House of Stairs

William Sleator was an American author of children’s and young adult fiction. Born in 1945 in Maryland, Sleator died in 2011 in Thailand, where he lived part of the year. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in writing, Sleator started his career as a professional pianist in the UK and the US but eventually turned to writing full-time. He stated:

I’ve always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as a rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the USA and Europe—I wasn’t making enough money from writing to support myself. [...] When book sales picked up and I started speaking at schools—which was very lucrative—I quit the ballet job (Antosca, Nick. “An Interview With William Sleator, YA Novelist.” HuffPost, 18 Mar. 2010).

Sleator’s first book, The Angry Moon, was published in 1970 and received a Caldecott Honor, one of the most prestigious awards in Children’s Literature. After releasing two novels based on his personal experiences, Blackbriar in 1972 and Run in 1973, Sleator then published House of Stairs in 1974, paving the way for his success in the genre of science fiction and psychological dystopia. The novel’s title is directly inspired by M. C. Escher’s well-known lithograph print of the same name. Sleator describes his inspiration for his novel as follows:

Although I have plenty of nasty characters in my books, because they are more interesting (Who do we gossip about? Nice people or obnoxious people?) at the same time I try to stay away from good vs. evil. People adore that plot concept. I find it banal. Still, there are plenty of people in the world who you wouldn’t exactly call evil, but who still do destructive things. For instance, the villain in House of Stairs does something that most people never do, which is to tell people nasty things that someone else said about them, who said it and exactly what they said, with some elaboration. I knew someone in high school who did this, and who destroyed relationships this way. It sure juiced up the plot! (Antosca, Nick. “An Interview With William Sleator, YA Novelist.” HuffPost, 18 Mar. 2010).

Sleator’s most popular books also include, among many others, Interstellar Pig (1984), Singularity (1985), Oddballs (1993), Rewind (1999), and The Phantom Limb (2011). William Sleator has earned critical acclaim for his speculative fiction, which often delves into the emotional dynamics of reluctant heroes being put into unfamiliar situations, and has been praised for his “spare, stylish, often darkly comic prose” (Fox, Margalit. “William Sleator, Fantasy Writer for Young Adults, Dies at 66.” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 2011).