What do empty malls, abandoned grocery stores, parking lots, laundry rooms late at night, and houses filled with endless rooms within rooms all have in common? These are all examples of liminal spaces: a place that feels disquieting, out-of-time, or eerie for reasons that cannot be placed. Once bustling with people, these spaces are now abandoned, void of noise and life, resulting in a downright spooky atmosphere.
The Backrooms, perhaps most famously, wielded the liminal space to viral success. What started as a fictional 4chan post featuring a picture of a carpeted yellow room became the inspiration for a breakout YouTube short film and a popular, procedurally generated indie survival horror video game. Now, Kane Parsons, who made the YouTube short, has adapted his work into Backrooms, the upcoming A24 movie directed by Kane Parsons himself and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, and Mark Duplass.
While liminal spaces thrive in visual mediums, novelists have had their own successful run channeling these eerie, empty rooms. The following books all contain equally unsettling examples of liminal spaces ranging from unending houses, to vast and hellish libraries, to haunted furniture stores. If you’re looking for something to send a shiver up your spine while waiting for Backrooms — and if you’ve already seen 2026’s other liminal space hit, Exit 8 — it’s worth no-clipping out of reality into the pages of these books.
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
If you think that a library containing an infinite number of books sounds like heaven, uh… you’d be wrong.
In Steven L. Peck’s thought-provoking horror novella, A Short Stay in Hell, a Mormon man named Soren Johansson finds himself journeying through the shelves of an endless library after he dies. The only way out of this literary hell is to find the book that contains the story of his life, which is, of course, a seemingly impossible task.
Though quite a quick read at 108 pages, A Short Stay in Hell packs a heavy emotional punch, proving itself to be the kind of book you’ll return to again and again for an existential and truly hellish experience.
A Short Stay in Hell is available for $11.14 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org
Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix
Night at the Museum by way of a haunted IKEA, Grady Hendrix’s paranormal thriller, Horrorstör is proof that liminal space can be as humorous as it is horrifying.
Cleverly designed to resemble a home decor catalog and with chapters that each start with a picture of a piece of furniture and a description that gets progressively more disturbing as the book goes on, Horrorstör is about Orsk, an ill-fated superstore in Cleveland, Ohio.
Each morning, employees arrive to work only to discover that the products they need to be selling have been destroyed. To make matters worse, security cameras have been unable to capture any incriminating footage. Determined to get to the bottom of who— or what — is causing so much damage, three Orsk employees generously volunteer to work from dusk till dawn, locked in the eerie superstore in order to investigate the showroom after customers have gone home.
Horrörstor is available for $8.39 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski
While a bona fide classic, we would be remiss not to include House of Leaves in a book list focusing on liminal spaces.
Best picked away at over a long period of time — that way you don’t lose your grip on reality entirely as you do — House of Leaves tells the story of Johnny Truant, a tattoo shop employee who discovers a mysterious academic manuscript his neighbor wrote in response to a movie called The Navidson Record. Truant’s neighbor claims that, in the movie, the Navidson family — Will, Karen, and their two daughters — move into their new home on Ash Tree Lane. Shortly after, they notice something strange: the house is less than an inch bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Things only get more unsettling from there, starting with the fact that Truant quickly discovers that there is no record of a movie called The Navidson Record, and most of the documents that his neighbor cites in his manuscript don’t actually exist.
Packed with layered footnotes that tell multiple stories (some which require non-linear reading and for readers to literally rotate the book), color coding, diagrams, and disorienting use of text on the page, it’s as easy to get lost in the pages of Danielewski’s novel as it is to get lost in the levels of The Backrooms.
House of Leaves is available for $22 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org
The Grip of It by Jac Jemc
If you’ve already read House of Leaves and are looking for another strange, liminal house to get lost in, The Grip of It by Jac Jemc is a great place to start.
When James and Julia move into their new house, the last thing they expect is for it to turn against them. Monstrous drawings appear, hidden rooms within rooms open and shut during the middle of the night, and the stains on the walls begin to look strangely the same as the bruises on Julia’s body. As they search for the source of their anguish and any information on the house’s mysterious previous residents, James and Julia’s world becomes more disjointed and dangerous.
The Grip of It oozes dread and will keep you up at night wondering if the noises you’re hearing are just the house settling or something entirely more sinister.
The Grip Of It is available for $10.05 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org
