Upon finishing Ben Farthing’s I FOUND A LOST HALLWAY IN A DYING MALL, I flipped it over to read the back of the book.  There, on the back cover, was this quote from horror author Jonathan Butcher:  “The eeriest liminal setting and an array of heartfelt themes bubbling beneath the surface.”

I fully agree on the heartfelt themes.  I’m sort of where Farthing’s main character is in her life right now.  Kids are grown and moved out, and while there aren’t any grandkids for us yet, I get the emotions that go with the transition. You go from being needed to maybe not really being needed so much, and maybe you begin to feel like an afterthought. You start to look for niches you can fit into in their busy lives and trying to balance between trying to naturally insert yourself into those niches and trying to force your way in. Ben addresses this in a remarkable way in this book, I feel. 

But that’s not where I was going with this blog post.  Because there is also a second quote on the back cover, from horror author Debra Castaneda, and it goes like this: “A landscape of liminal horrors.”  

Note the overlap there? “Liminal.” Honestly, I didn’t know what the word meant. So I looked it up and here’s the definition.  Liminal means “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” Okay, that’s a start.  Moving on, liminal horror like Farthing’s and maybe others uses these spaces in a frightening way, such as by making them empty, stretching on forever, or being places where people are not meant to linger.

Now I’m getting somewhere. I think I’m beginning to understand why it unsettles me. Empty, stretching on forever, places where people (like me) aren’t meant to be. That resonates. 

See, as a youngster, my parents decided to teach me a lesson in Marshall Field’s store in Chicago.  Our trips to the store were rare treats, and their toy section was like nothing I’d ever seen!  I guess I was wandering off all the time, and they finally decided to just let me go. They were right around the corner, but when I realized I was “lost”, I bolted.  The other way.  Fast, crying and screaming. (I was fast when I was a kid.) I was grabbed by a store employee and taken to some kind of a control center where they kept me and called the “little lost boy” alert and my parents came and got me. 

I still remember this as an adult. Not specifics, but I remember that control room. I remember the panic. I remember running and crying. I thought I was never going to get home again! It was terrifying! I would wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares about this growing up. I would sit up in bed in the middle of the night, terrified that I might have never been found — that I might have been lost forever in that huge liminal space that was Marshall Field’s flagship department store! 

Ben Farthing taps into this fear in an incredibly personal manner in all three of his books. In his I FOUND A CIRCUS TENT IN MY BACK YARD, the protagonist unwillingly enters a large colorful tent that they find in the woods behind his home with his four-year-old son, and discovers that the interior is impossibly large, going on and on with no exit in sight.  In his I FOUND PUPPETS LIVING IN MY APARTMENT WALLS, the protagonist discovers a hidden space behind the drywall of the bedroom, and when he and his cousin explore it, they find that it consistently descends into the bowels of the earth, much further down than is possible. 

Wouldn’t you know it? Right after finishing DYING MALL (which I purchased directly from the author at the Books and Brews event in Evanston, Illinois in early August), Amazon for some reason showed me an anthology of short stories called simple LIMINAL. The fifteen stories deal with some interesting candidates for liminal spaces, including a greenhouse (yeah, I get this one — I remember going into greenhouses as a kid and just being amazed by the way they just seemed to keep going and going), an office building, suburbs, a beach, a hatchery, a waiting room, a prison, a “float barn” (whatever that is), a playground, a library, a nightclub, an “Isomart,” a school, a mall and a rest stop bathroom. I’ve read the first two, and they are suitably disturbing.

My own idea is maybe a parking lot. Something like those huge lots at Disney or Universal, where they just seem to go on and on and on and on. So large that you have to take trams to reach the furthest edges…if you even can.  I think I’m going to try a short story set in a parking lot.  A hospital or a medical office might make a good setting also. 

Back to Farthing’s stories, and the stories in the anthology — is escape from this sort of liminal space even possible?  Will our friends find their way out? How will it affect them?  Those questions are terrifying to me.  Honestly, these may be the first books that have ever really made me uncomfortable, and now I understand why. (I couldn’t put my finger on it when reading the book itself.) The idea of impossible spaces is simply disturbing to me.  Because of my childhood experience? Probably. But even quite literally 6 decades later, I am still frightened by the idea.