No-Mans Land: 14 Horror Books Exploring Liminal Spaces

Neither here nor there, but somewhere in between

As we slip languidly into the week between Christmas and New Year – a week that may or may not exist – it seems like the perfect time to explore liminal spaces, where the borders between reality and the unknown become blurred.

Just out of sight, occasionally glimpsed from the corner of your eye, liminal spaces are transitional zones, neither here nor there. They are the uncharted territories, the wastelands, between the everyday world you see and feel and touch and know, and … what? What is on the other side?

The haunting allure of liminal spaces comes from the feeling that there must be more to the universe, and life, than what you see with your own eyes.

Liminal horror provides a glimpse into what might be there, waiting to catch your attention, and it may be terrifying, worse than anything your imagination could conceive. Liminal horror stories are cosmic horror, existential horror, psychological horror, or all or none of those. Who knows for sure what is real and what is not?

So, venture across the threshold, to where the ordinary is not so ordinary, where the extraordinary looms large as it steps from the shadows and shows you that your nightmares may not be nightmares after all, but something very, very real.

Here are fourteen horror books with stories of spaces that are not what they seem, where terror lurks just beyond the boundaries of perception. Stories that beckon you to the edge, then shove you into the beyond.

Let the nightmares begin.

More liminal spaces horror book recommendations can be found at: Liminal spaces.

Apartment 16 (2014) – Adam L.G. Nevill

In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in and no one comes out, and it’s been that way for 50 years. Then one night a watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and is drawn to investigate. What he experiences changes his life forever.

A young American woman, Apryl, arrives at Barrington House. She’s been left an apartment by her mysterious Great Aunt Lillian who died in strange circumstances. Rumors claim Lillian was mad, but her diary suggests she was implicated in a horrific and inexplicable event decades ago.

Determined to learn something of this eccentric woman, Apryl begins to unravel the hidden story of Barrington House. She discovers that a transforming, evil force still inhabits the building, and that the doorway to Apartment 16 is a gateway to something altogether more terrifying.

The Between (2021) – Ryan Leslie

While landscaping his backyard, Paul discovers an iron door buried in the soil. His childhood friend, Jay, pushes them to explore what’s beneath.

When the door slams shut above them, Paul and Jay are trapped in a between-worlds place of Escher-like rooms and horror story monsters, all with a mysterious connection to a command-line, dungeon explorer computer game from the early ’80s called The Between.

Paul and Jay find themselves filling roles in a story that seems to play out over and over again. But in this world, where their roles warp their minds, the biggest threat to survival may not be the Koŝmaro, risen from the Between’s depths to hunt them; the biggest danger may be each other.

Briardark (2023) – S.A. Harian

For Dr. Siena Dupont and her ambitious team, the Alpenglow glacier expedition is a career-defining opportunity. But thirty miles into the desolate Deadswitch Wilderness, they discover a missing hiker dangling from a tree.

Then the body vanishes.

The disappearance isn’t the only chilling anomaly. Siena’s map no longer aligns with the trail. The glacier they were supposed to study has inexplicably melted. Strange foliage overruns the mountainside, and a tunnel within a tree hollow lures Siena to a hidden cabin, and a stranger with a sinister message.

Holden Sharpe’s IT job offers little distraction from his wasted potential until he stumbles upon a decommissioned hard drive and an old audio file. Trapped on a mountain, Dr. Siena Dupont recounts an expedition in chaos and the bloody death of a colleague.

Entranced by the mystery, Holden searches for answers to Siena’s fate. But he is unprepared for the truth that will draw him to the outskirts of Deadswitch Wilderness, a place teeming with unfathomable nightmares and impossibilities.

Dead Sea (2022) – Tim Curran

When the Mara Corday, an aged freighter, enters the Graveyard of the Atlantic, nightmares become real.

The crew finds themselves trapped in a realm where time doesn’t exist and unimaginable horrors dwell. Lost in a becalmed sea, in a netherworld where evil manifests itself in hideous forms, the survivors of the Mara Corday have an eternity to find a way out … if they aren’t killed first by the creatures stalking them.

Dream Science (1990) – Thomas Palmer

Why does Rocker Poole, a nondescript businessman living in Connecticut, find himself confined for months in a small windowless office he has never seen before?

What is the meaning of his abrupt departures into foreign places clearly different from our world?

Is he going mad?

Is he being transported to parallel universes where he becomes trapped?

For Emmy (2021) – Mary SanGiovanni

Dana McCluskey and her father know very well that there can be dangers around every corner. They wanted to keep Emmy safe.

But it is impossible to see some dangers coming. And there are those corners that you’d never see, out-of-the-way places just beyond our grasp where loved ones can get very lost. And the danger there is very real indeed.

The Grip of It (2017) – Jac Jemc

Touring their prospective suburban home, Julie and James are stopped by a noise. Deep and vibrating, like throat singing. Ancient, husky, and rasping, but underwater. “That’s just the house settling,” the real estate agent assures them with a smile. He is wrong.

The move – prompted by James’s penchant for gambling and his general inability to keep his impulses in check – is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to start afresh. But this house, which sits between a lake and a forest, has its own plans for the unsuspecting couple.

As Julie and James try to establish a sense of normalcy, the home and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings.

The framework – claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms – becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall, contracting, expanding, and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of painful, grisly bruises.

The house and their lives become full of secrets and confusion and distrust.

The House on Abigail Lane (2022) – Kealan Patrick Burke

From the outside, it looks like an ordinary American home, but since its construction in 1956, people have vanished as soon as they go upstairs, the only clues the things they leave behind: a wedding ring, a phone … an eye.

In its sixty-year history, a record number of strange events have been attributed to the house, from the neighbors waking up to find themselves standing in the yard outside, to the grieving man who vanished before a police officer’s eyes. The animals gathering in the yard as if summoned. The people who speak in reverse. The lights and sounds. The music. The grass dying overnight, and the ten-foot clown on the second floor.

And as long as there are mysteries, people will be compelled to solve them.

Here, then, is the most comprehensive account of the Abigail House phenomenon, the result of sixty years of eyewitness accounts, news reports, scientific research, and parapsychological investigations, all in an attempt to decode the enduring mystery that is The House on Abigail Lane.

The Hollow Places (2020) – T. Kingfisher

“Pray that they are hungry…”

Carrot has moved into the Wonder Museum – an eclectic collection of taxidermy, shrunken heads, and Mystery Junk owned by her Uncle Earl. For Carrot, it’s not creepy at all. She grew up with it.

What is creepy is the corridor behind one of the museum walls. There’s just no space for a corridor there, or the concrete bunker, or the strange islands beyond the bunker’s doors, or the unseen things in the willow trees.

Carrot has stumbled into a horrifying world, and They are watching her. Strewn among the islands are the remains of Their meals and Their experiments.

And even if she manages to make it home, she can’t stop calling Them after her…

House of Leaves (2000) – Mark Z. Danielewski

A young family moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story: of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

The Langoliers (1990) – Stephen King

On a cross-country, redeye flight from Los Angeles to Boston, ten passengers awaken in Bangor, Maine, to find that the crew and most of their fellow passengers have disappeared. The airport shows no signs of life. Yet they hear “radio static” in the distance.

Craig Toomey, an irritable investment banker on the verge of a breakdown, believes it is “The Langoliers,” monsters he was afraid of as a child who attack those who waste time.

Mystery author Bob Jenkins theorizes that they have flown through a time rip. Bob declares they have entered a place that forbids time travelers to observe or interfere with past events.

Craig is right, in a way. Creatures emerge from the forest and head for the plane, consuming everything in their path. Can the survivors manage to fly the plane back to Los Angeles, back to the correct time, before The Langoliers succeed in their deadly mission to destroy the plane and the world?

Novella originally included in Four Past Midnight.

Liminal Spaces: An Anthology of Dark Speculative Fiction (2021) – Kevin Lucia (editor)

A liminal space is a “crossing over” space. A transitional space where we are neither one thing nor another. We are nowhere, and we are nothing, yet we are somewhere, something, and all things, at once.

Liminal spaces exist everywhere. All who are brave enough to venture out will wander into them eventually. Some lucky few escape. Many however, never do. They drift, lost in between, never finding a way to escape, belong, or simply be.

Lost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road (2018) – Crystal Lake Publishing

It’s dangerous out there on the road. The highways, byways and backroads of America are teeming day and night with regular folks.

Moms and dads making long commutes. Teenagers headed to the beach. Bands on their way to the next gig. Truckers pulling long hauls. Families driving cross country to visit their kin.

But there are others, too. The desperate and the lost. The cruel and the criminal. Theirs is a world of roadside honky-tonks, truck stops, motels, and the empty miles between destinations. The unseen spaces.

And there are even stranger things. Places that aren’t on any map. Wayfaring terrors and haunted legends about which seasoned and road-weary travelers only whisper.

But those are just stories. Aren’t they?

The Way Inn (2014) – Will Wiles

Neil Double is a “conference surrogate,” hired by his clients to attend industry conferences so that they don’t have to. It’s a life of budget travel, cheap suits, and out-of-town exhibition centers. A kind of paradise for Neil, who has reconstructed his incognito professional life into a toxic and selfish personal philosophy.

In a brand-new Way Inn – a global chain of identikit mid-budget motels – in an airport hinterland, he meets a woman he has seen before in strange and unsettling circumstances. She hints at an astonishing truth about this mundane world filled with fake smiles and piped muzak. But before Neil can learn more, she vanishes.

Intrigued, he tries to find her; a search that will lead him down the rabbit hole, into an eerily familiar place where he will discover a dark and disturbing secret about the Way Inn. Caught on a metaphysical Mobius strip, Neil discovers that there may be no way out.

Published: 26 December 2023