13 More Liminal Spaces Horror Book Recommendations
Yet again, we find ourselves in the liminal space between Christmas and New Year.
A week of nothingness during which we lose track of time and space and are never quite sure where we are or what we’re doing.
Here are 13 more horror book recommendations that lead to the in-between, a place between what is and what might be.
More liminal spaces horror book recommendations can be found at: Liminal spaces.
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Table of Contents
It Waits on the Top Floor – Ben Farthing
Liminal horror – Book 1 of Horror Lurks Beneath
Thursday night, it was a dirt lot.
Friday morning, it was a 60-story skyscraper.
A tech billionaire wants the building’s secrets for herself. She hires a team to reverse-engineer the overnight construction. But she knows more than she’s letting on.
A curious 9-year-old decides there’s treasure inside, and goes exploring. His terrified dad chases close behind.
Inside, the facade of an empty office building is quickly shattered. Ghostly figures stalk the explorers. The walls themselves are hungry. And something is waiting on the top floor.
“A crooked skyscraper sprung up overnight.”
Coup de Grâce - Sofia Ajram
Liminal horror
Vicken has a plan: throw himself into the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal and end it all for good, believing it to be the only way out for him after a lifetime of depression and pain. But, stepping off the subway, he finds himself in an endless, looping station.
Determined to find a way out again, he starts to explore the rooms and corridors ahead of him. But no matter how many claustrophobic hallways or vast cathedral-esque rooms he passes through, the exit is nowhere in sight.
The more he explores his strange new prison, the more he becomes convinced that he hasn’t been trapped there accidentally, and amongst the shadows and concrete, he comes to realise that he almost certainly is not alone.
“I’m going, going, gone.”
The Cipher – Kathe Koja
Liminal horror
When a strange hole materializes in a storage room, would-be poet Nicholas and his feral lover Nakota allow their curiosity to lead them into the depths of terror.
“Wouldn’t it be wild to go down there?” says Nakota.
Nicholas says, “We’re not.”
But no one is in control, and their experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole.
“Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you looked at it too closely…”
Last to Leave the Room – Caitlin Starling
Liminal horror
The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster.
As Tamsin becomes obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before – and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her.
This doppelgänger is sweet and biddable where Tamsin is calculating and cruel. It appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, to lose track of time, to grow terrified of the outside world.
With her employer growing increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads.
“This space is a cathedral of the mind.”
The Door – Boris Bacic
Liminal horror
There’s a locked door in Nathan’s new apartment. At night, it opens.
But Nathan doesn’t know that – until he starts hearing eerie scratching noises coming from behind it.
Footsteps resound in his apartment, objects are mysteriously moved out of place, and no matter what he tries, he can’t get the door open.
Then one night, the door opens on its own, revealing a long, dark corridor. Nathan is immediately compelled to explore it, going further inside each night, ignoring the distant creaking sounds.
By the time he realizes what horrors lie inside the corridor, he becomes trapped in his own apartment, with only one way out – through the corridor.
“The light of her torch barely penetrated the permeating darkness ahead…”
Liminal: 15 Horror Stories about Infinite Spaces – Blair Daniels
Liminal horror anthology
WAITING ROOM: A man finds himself lost in a doctor’s waiting room, for all of eternity.
SUBURB: A couple gets lost in a never-ending development of identical, cookie-cutter houses.
ISOMART: A big box store that never ends…
Back rooms.
Never-ending offices.
Hallways that twist and turn.
The stories in this book explore liminal spaces – infinite, unsettling, shrouded in darkness.
“I fly through greenhouse after greenhouse in quick succession, each completely unique.”
The House that Fell from the Sky – Patrick Delaney
Liminal horror
When twenty-nine-year-old Scarlett Vantassel decides that her life doesn’t resemble any of the things she actually wanted for herself, she drops out of school and moves back home, attempting to reconnect with the people she left behind.
But a shadow falls over her return one early October morning when a sinister house miraculously appears in the center of the city, sparking a media frenzy that attracts attention nationwide.
Soon after the newspapers label it, “The House that Fell from the Sky,” Scarlett’s childhood friend Hannah becomes obsessed with the idea that the house holds the key to discovering whether there really is life after death. Undeterred by her friends’ numerous warnings, Hannah becomes increasingly consumed with the desire to enter the house, convinced it would allow her to reconnect with her recently deceased mother.
Despite a series of escalating events suggesting that the house may be more dangerous than anyone ever thought possible, a privately owned company seizes control of the property and hosts a lottery to lure the city’s residents, promising the winners a large cash reward if they dare to enter the house. To Scarlett’s horror, Hannah uses her vast wealth to secure a spot among the winners to gain access to the house.
Now, it’s up to Scarlett, her older brother Tommy, and her friend Jackson to face their fears and journey into a place where nothing is ever quite as it seems, and decide if they can help a friend in need, or if Hannah truly is lost.
“As silence began to settle to Winterview, she listened to a noise that sounded like a football field-sized slab of concrete had been dropped from the night sky, into the world in an earth-shattering, cataclysmic thunder.”
The Spiral – Gideon Burrows
Liminal horror
What if the staircase you are walking down never ends?
Four very different strangers are trapped alive on a spiral staircase, 129 steps deep under the City of London.
They have no food. There is no water. No-one even knows they’re missing.
Time is ticking and together they must find a way out before they starve to death.
But as thirst, hunger and despair take over, personalities clash and their darkest secrets are exposed.
Pushed to their very limits, it becomes a desperate battle to survive.
Who will give up? Who will die? And who will fight to the very end?
“Charles was only 30 or so steps down when he had to take his first rest.”
Unworld – J.R. Curtis
Liminal horror
Fleeing an abusive relationship, Ellie Carson suddenly finds herself in The Unworld; a peculiar in-between, mimicking our reality. A place with infinite entrances for those who aren’t looking. A strange realm filled with forgotten things, people, and beings that shouldn’t exist. The underside of the cross-stitching of time, never seen and all binding.
The way out is always shifting, and may not exist at all.
With help from others among the lost, Ellie begins the treacherous journey out of the realm between worlds.
At their heels, a lunatic known only as The Junkman, leads an army of lost souls in pursuit of Ellie and her small party of misfits, to fulfill their own sinister goals.
“Ellie Carson had always been afraid. Ever since she was a little girl, standing before the bus on the first day of school.”
Scatter – Mindy Macfarlane
Liminal horror
After witnessing the aftermath of his wife’s untimely death, Russell Clark finds himself hundreds of miles away from home at a casino resort tucked away in an unfamiliar town.
While there, he encounters strange situations and stranger people, including a menacing figure that he swears has it out for him.
With every passing night, Russell’s sanity spins further out of his control and even in the face of his mounting losses, something sinister keeps pulling him back in.
Can he beat the odds and hit it big, or does the house always win?
“There is a sound that only the dying can hear. Can you hear it yet, Russell?”
Briarpatch – Tim Pratt
Liminal horror
Darrin’s life has been going downhill ever since his girlfriend Bridget walked out on him without a word of explanation six months ago.
Soon after losing her, he lost his job, and his car, and eventually his enthusiasm for life. He can’t imagine things getting worse – until he sees Bridget again, for the first time since she walked out, just moments before she leaps to her death from a bridge.
In his quest to find out why Bridget took her own life, he encounters a depressive (and possibly immortal) cult leader; a man with a car that can drive out of this world and into others; a beautiful psychotic with a chrome shotgun; and a bridge that, maybe, leads to heaven.
Darrin’s journey leads him into a place called the Briarpatch, which is either the crawlspace of the universe, or a series of ambitious building projects abandoned by god, or a tangle of alternative universes, depending on who you ask. Somewhere in that disorderly snarl of worlds, he hopes to find Bridget again, or at least a reason to live without her.
“Bridget was wearing the red coat when he watched her die. That was a colder day, and it was windy then, up on the bridge.”
Subcutanean 36619 – Aaron A. Reed
Liminal horror
Insecure college senior Orion loves music, books, and his best friend Niko. When the two of them find a secret basement in their rambling old off-campus house, at first Orion’s thrilled. It’s another secret to share, an adventure to maybe, at last, bring them closer together.
But something’s wrong: the basement doesn’t end. Blandly decorated halls stretch on for miles past peeling wallpaper, empty bedrooms, and countless stairwells always leading down. Soon they realize Downstairs is a snarled tangle of possibilities. Something down there multiplies everything: architecture, emotions, even people.
Together they navigate an increasingly dangerous labyrinth filled with two-faced doppelgangers, treacherous architecture, and long-buried secrets. Most dangerous of all is Orion’s consuming obsession: somewhere down there, is there a Niko who loves him back?
Subcutanean is a permutational novel: the text can be rendered in millions of different ways. This is version 36619, one of several available on traditional platforms. Your book contains instructions to unlock your own wholly unique digital version, with different words, sentences, or even entire scenes.
“Right from the start things were wrong, but I couldn’t see it.”
I Am Behind You – John Ajvide Lindqist
Liminal horror
Molly wakes her mother to go to the toilet. The campsite is strangely blank. The toilet block has gone. Everything else has gone too. This is a place with no sun. No god.
Just four families remain. Each has done something to bring them here – each denies they deserve it. Until they see what’s coming over the horizon, moving irrevocably towards them. Their worst mistake. Their darkest fear.
And for just one of them, their homecoming.
“Her first thought is: scenery. Like the backdrop behind Mickey Mouse’s caravan on TV on Christmas Eve, Something artificial, unreal. But the details are too sharp, the three dimensions clearly distinguishable. This is no backdrop.”
Published: 26 December 2024
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