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 * For other works entitled House of Stairs, see House of Stairs (disambiguation).

The House of Stairs (1974) (ISBN 0-14-034580-9) is a science fiction novel by William Sleator.

Plot summary
In a dystopian future, five sixteen-year-olds are taken from state orphanages and placed in a strange building. The building, neither a prison nor a hospital, has no walls, no ceiling, no floor: nothing but endless flights of stairs leading nowhere. On one landing is a basin of running water that serves as a toilet, sink and drinking fountain; on another, a machine with lights that occasionally produces food. The five must each learn to deal with the others' widely-divergent personalities, the lack of privacy, their apparent helplessness and the strange machine that only feeds them under increasingly exacting circumstances. Soon, it becomes clear that the machine - or those behind it - have a sinister agenda in store for the five main characters. The question then becomes: Is death by starvation preferable to allowing the hidden authorities to reprogram their minds? An epilogue reveals that they are subjects in a psychological experiment on conditioned human response, designed to create political pawns for the ruling "administration."

Literary significance & criticism
Some have remarked on how Sleator's book has less in common with the work of fellow young adult horror author R. L. Stine than the respected writings of Franz Kafka. Many readers have found the novel's plausibility, paranoid tone, eerie imagery and jarring finale far more haunting than stories of werewolves or vampires.

A few critics have derided The House of Stairs as a carbon copy of William Golding's classic, The Lord of the Flies. Others, however, see it as the polar opposite, since the protagonists are not in danger of degenerating into savage anarchy, but of crystallizing into a thoughtless mechanical existence. Some suggest that the moral to Sleator's story is a far more sophisticated message than Golding's, which is, at least on one level, a simple exhortation for children to behave politely. Sleator, on the other hand, is actively encouraging his young readers to rebel against abusive authority.