The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

 

This starts out vibing like some sort of relatively safe Portal Fantasy, but Wendig writes Horror: What's past the staircase isn't some twinkly Fairyland but a hungry and hateful nexus of badplaces, scarred by pain and death, all the things houses see and all the things they keep secret within their walls. It's like a haunted house novel that's all quantum-entangled. The writing is good, Wendig clearly has a sense of these characters and the pain they live with--and the sorts of pain the houses know--as well as at least some of the places. It's interesting to me, for reasons, that his ur-suburb is clearly a riff on Levittown, but he didn't seem to be trying to hide that (just using fictional names). There's some gore, here, and some mashing on other Bug Buttons, but it's Horror, I'm not complaining. Seemed to me to be a little sludge and mud through the middle, but nothing that really slowed me down or put me off.