House of Stairs (William Sleator novel)

infobox Book |
name = House of Stairs
title_orig = House of Stairs
translator =


image_caption = House of Stairs by William Sleator (1975 paperback edition)
author = William Sleator
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Young adult, Science fiction novel
publisher = E.P. Dutton (1974), Puffin (1991), Firebird/Penguin (2004)
release_date = 1974
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages =
isbn = ISBN 0-140-34580-9
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"House of Stairs" (1974) is a science fiction novel by William Sleator.

Plot summary

In a 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. One of the protagonists is a slightly slow boy who tends to follow authority; one is a rebellious juvenile deliquent girl; one is a spoiled girl who grew up amidst wealth but who was recently orphaned; one is a handsome, popular boy athlete; one is a pretty, passive girl who has a crush on the athlete. Soon, it becomes clear that the machine - or those behind it - has 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 to be spies for the ruling "administration."

Fictional Conditioning

In the book, the machine gives food. It gives delicious steak, a delicacy that few can eat in the future, where meat is scarce, and everyone normally eats specially designed food. The first few times, food is given freely, but later, food is given only when increasingly stricter body movements are done, ending near the end of the book with a long, complex dance routine. It is made clear that a red or green light appears when a dance can be performed for food, but that the color of the light is irrelevant. When the "subjects' are allowed out, it is discovered that the three who succumbed to the conditioning cannot even tell the difference between a green light and a red light, trained only to "dance" and do what they were "programmed" to do.