I had a student job nearly 20 years ago, in a huge library. One of my tasks was to retrieve stuff in the underground archives. Apologies if my prose is bad, English isn't my first language :) Now...
I had a student job nearly 20 years ago, in a huge library. One of my tasks was to retrieve stuff in the underground archives. Apologies if my prose is bad, English isn't my first language :)
Now imagine. You're in the elevator, going down to -5, the doors open on this massive floor that someone only briefly showed you a few days ago. The fluorescent lamps of the central aisle automatically light up, and you begin walking. On your left and right are dozens of narrow rows of shelves, that are so long that the light can't reach the end. And you're there all alone, walking past these identical never-ending shelves that end in darkness, looking for some decades-old newspaper. The further you're going from the elevator, the more uneasy you are. You hope that the motion detectors all work so the lights don't suddenly go out.
But you're on the wrong floor, what you're looking for is actually in -6. So you take the service stairs down, and arrive on this floor that somehow looks even more oppressive. It's smaller, the ceiling is lower, the shelves are packed tighter, and at the end of the floor, in a corner, there is this massive metal door. It looks so out of place, what could be on the other side? But you don't dare open it, not a chance. You know ghosts and monsters don't exist, you're an adult, but you won't open this door.
A few days later, you go down again, but with another student, who also noticed this door, and also did not open it. But now you're not alone, so why not open it, just to peek? You unlock the heavy lever, and pull the door. There is a sudden draft with a howl, the wind almost closes the door by itself, as if you're the first ones to open it in years. And inside, there's literally nothing. An empty dark space of concrete floors and walls, that is only barely lit up by the light coming from the open door. You can't see past a few meters, so you close the door. You ask one of the librarians what's inside, what's the purpose of the heavy metal door, and they don't know. It's probably a maintenance access or something, but no-one knows.
Anyway, I'm going nowhere with this, but each time I see something about liminal spaces, I think of that floor and its never-ending shelves of decades-old books and newspapers shrouded in darkness. Actually when we were both there, it was the best place to chill. But we avoided -6.
Powerful imagery, shivers down my spine. That wasn't just good English. It was artful. I'd hate to imagine what you'd think of us after a day as a fly on the wall in a UK school if this is...
Powerful imagery, shivers down my spine. That wasn't just good English. It was artful.
I'd hate to imagine what you'd think of us after a day as a fly on the wall in a UK school if this is standard requires excuse....
This isn't relevant to anything substantive in your comment, but I absolutely adore when people preface their comments with this and then proceed to write an artfully constructed comment in...
Apologies if my prose is bad, English isn't my first language :)
This isn't relevant to anything substantive in your comment, but I absolutely adore when people preface their comments with this and then proceed to write an artfully constructed comment in essentially flawless English. I don't know why it tickles me so much, but it does.
I even have a parody of the phenomenon I wrote years ago that springs to mind whenever I see it: "Please excuse my rough and unruly English, for I am but late-come to the tongue of fair Albion's shores..."
"Basic" isn't at all a weakness in prose provided it's effective, and yours was. If I absolutely had to find fault with your comment as an erstwhile copy editor of English, it would be in your...
"Basic" isn't at all a weakness in prose provided it's effective, and yours was.
If I absolutely had to find fault with your comment as an erstwhile copy editor of English, it would be in your inconsistent use of commas to delineate clauses. However, that's not really an issue with your English per se. If I had to guess, I'd wager you have similar habits when writing in your native language as well, assuming you use some form of the Roman alphabet. That's a stumbling block for orthography in pretty much every language that uses punctuation to set off various clause types.
In my exalted opinion, your written English appears to be at least as fluent as that of the overwhelming majority of native English speakers, so I'd put that anxiety to bed if it causes you stress.
I'm gonna be fair, I've had similar experiences on floor 3 and 4 with some archival libraries so I can imagine being that far in a basement only enhanced that fun.
I'm gonna be fair, I've had similar experiences on floor 3 and 4 with some archival libraries so I can imagine being that far in a basement only enhanced that fun.
Honestly I enjoyed that feeling. I worked there for a month, three years in a row. I loved going to the archives, my imagination was going wild while I rationally knew I was safe.
Honestly I enjoyed that feeling. I worked there for a month, three years in a row. I loved going to the archives, my imagination was going wild while I rationally knew I was safe.
When I was a grad student, we had a common office for all the first-year graduate students. Our office was located in the basement, but it still had a window, so we were at least graced with a...
When I was a grad student, we had a common office for all the first-year graduate students. Our office was located in the basement, but it still had a window, so we were at least graced with a sliver of natural light. However, the physics building had other offices that were relegated even farther underground and could only be accessed by a particular stairwell. I liked to jokingly refer to this area as the "sub-basement".
While wandering around the sub-basement one day (as a bored graduate student was wont to do) I came across a mostly abandoned hallway with some rooms at the end. At the end of one of these rooms was a door, which led to a small corridor, which lead to yet more rooms. In one of these rooms I found a door leading to a downward staircase. Curious, I climbed down the stairs to an unlit space, finding two small rooms with a few tables, some chairs, a couple whiteboards, and some nearly-empty bookshelves holding the occasional physics textbook. Nonplussed, I dubbed this area the "sub-sub-basement" and returned to the other graduate students to report my findings.
The discovery was a bit perplexing. As the space was much smaller than the rest of the floor above it, it must have lain between the foundations of the building, almost as if it had been squeezed into place. Stranger yet was its remoteness: unless one knew where to look, one would be unlikely to find this stairwell by happenstance. Therefore, as an office, it made no logical sense: Why did the architects feel compelled to build it? Why would one put an office in a place no one could find? How could one conduct office hours from here?
Evidently none of the other first-year graduate students had heard of the sub-sub-basement, so after I showed them to it, we decided to consult with our wiser nth-year seniors. "Oh right," one explained, "that place. Apparently that used to be the first-year office."
I'm probably about 60% of the way through House of Leaves, and have been for several months. It's a tough read--there are like three or four simultaneously running narratives (at least one of...
I'm probably about 60% of the way through House of Leaves, and have been for several months. It's a tough read--there are like three or four simultaneously running narratives (at least one of which hasn't grabbed me at all, so whenever that one comes up it feels like a bit of a slog), and there are passages with so many footnotes that the footnotes themselves are multiple pages longer than the actual passages they're footnoting (and those footnotes may also have their own footnotes). A lot of those footnotes also cite other books, talks, and papers, at least some of which are fictional in-world ones that don't actually exist (I suspect some of them are real citations to real works but even if that's true there are so many citations it'd be a full time job just figuring out which are which). The edition I have has passages in different colors and different fonts which all indicate different things, some passages are completely crossed out which indicates something else, and the whole thing is written in a way where the words and letters themselves are occasionally laid out in ways that mimic what's going on in the story (sometimes upside down, sometimes snaking their way around an otherwise mostly empty page, stuff like that) so can also prove physically difficult to read.
I absolutely love the idea of House of Leaves, which is why I picked it up and started reading it, but I'm not enjoying it as much as I hoped and not even sure I'll ever finish it.
House of Leaves is an absolute masterpiece. It's very hard going in parts (the encrypted parts are a little much) but it is worth it. The only thing I can compare it to is the paper equivalent of...
House of Leaves is an absolute masterpiece. It's very hard going in parts (the encrypted parts are a little much) but it is worth it. The only thing I can compare it to is the paper equivalent of the films of David Lynch. It's much more uncanny than horrifying, I think.
Spot on as far as the audience experience, though I'm of the belief that their intents are polar opposites. House of Leaves is intended to be difficult, with the ergodic genre chosen specifically...
the paper equivalent of the films of David Lynch
Spot on as far as the audience experience, though I'm of the belief that their intents are polar opposites. House of Leaves is intended to be difficult, with the ergodic genre chosen specifically to that end. With Lynch, I get the distinct impression that the difficulty is more organic, and is the result of how he interacts with the world, rather than a choice. Which is neither really here nor there, I'm just a huge fan of both and enjoy discussing them with anyone who's willing.
That's an interesting point of view. I'm not sure I entirely agree about Danielewski's intent, but equally I have no way to argue against it either. He seems like a pretty weird dude, but I'm not...
That's an interesting point of view. I'm not sure I entirely agree about Danielewski's intent, but equally I have no way to argue against it either. He seems like a pretty weird dude, but I'm not sure there are many people who occupy the same weird league as Lynch does. I absolutely agree that Lynch's difficulty comes from his way of looking at the world and mediating that into film, rather than trying to be deliberately obtuse. David Lynch is such a deeply strange and wonderful man.
But while both are difficult, it's the uncanny nature of the texts which I find similar, and that's the same feeling I get with the backrooms stuff. Reading House of Leaves leaves me a little weirded the fuck out by reality for a few days in the same way that watching all of Twin Peaks in a weekend does. Nothing looks normal for a while. Every corner, every shadow, hides something bizarre and disturbing and magnetically fascinating and just out of sight.
Two House of Leaves things I usually mention in case people haven't heard of them:
Did you know there was a screenplay written for a House of Leaves TV series? Pilot episode script (link goes to PDF)
Also the tangential but still very much adjacent MyHouse.wad
Oh man, MyHouse.wad is so good! And thanks for reminding me about the screenplay, I had meant to read it years ago and it somehow fell off my radar. And yeah, I have nothing much to back up my...
Oh man, MyHouse.wad is so good! And thanks for reminding me about the screenplay, I had meant to read it years ago and it somehow fell off my radar.
And yeah, I have nothing much to back up my theories re: Danielewski, it's just a vague impression I get. Maybe it has something to do with his other works, none of which hit the same for me as House, whereas Lynch rarely misses. You're right that it's the uncanniness that links them though, I just tend to forget that difficult =/= uncanny in this context because for most people that seems to more or less be the case.
If you had to pick a band/album to go along with, what would it be (Poe's Haunted doesn't count lol)?
Edit: oh my god, what a day to have had this discussion. RIP David, you have left a hole in the world.
Ha, that's a great question. Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral seems a little obvious but I think it would work pretty well. Um.. how about Aphex Twin's Drukqs or RHY Yau's The Hidden Tongue....
If you had to pick a band/album to go along with, what would it be (Poe's Haunted doesn't count lol)?
Ha, that's a great question. Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral seems a little obvious but I think it would work pretty well. Um.. how about Aphex Twin's Drukqs or RHY Yau's The Hidden Tongue. How about you?
I'm torn between Nurse With Wound's Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's and this fucking thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7eF9F-RXCw I feel like I could elaborate on that, but as a...
House of Leaves is ... an experience ... or something. As noted by Rudism in their comment, there are a number of narratives going at once. And they overlap and kind of don't? It's a different...
House of Leaves is ... an experience ... or something. As noted by Rudism in their comment, there are a number of narratives going at once. And they overlap and kind of don't? It's a different kind of book and I will agree hard to get through. Some people call it post-modern fiction. I would maybe call it post-meta fiction.
That said, I did finish it and by the end I was blown away. Those narratives all do converge by the end, and honestly it leaves maybe more things hanging than you would expect.
Mild-ish House of Leaves spoilers - click to expand.
The fact that you have to work out, between the footnotes and other "extraneous" information presented in the book what is actually real (in book universe) and what is not, is something that I loved. I think there is probably enough information to really understand what happened, but it is not obvious. For example, even understanding where the story within the story came from isn't clear (this makes sense if you've read the book - I can't explain it better without writing out a few paragraphs of heavy spoilers for the entire thing).
It was honestly one of the least horror-y horror stories I've read. There are definitely some "hard" horror bits, but I think overall it's not really a horror story. I would probably lump it more into sci-fi than horror, but that's just me. As an unrelated aside, I do love the overlap of fantasy/sci-fi/horror and how there can be elements of any or all of those in any of them.
I've been trying to figure out why there's an almost romantic infatuations with the backrooms. I know there's the nostalgia factor but we didn't make an entire wiki dedicated to one post of a...
I've been trying to figure out why there's an almost romantic infatuations with the backrooms. I know there's the nostalgia factor but we didn't make an entire wiki dedicated to one post of a school or playground.
Looking back at previous waves of popular horror, the themes always reflected societal aspersions or/and anxieties. For example:
The old Victorian Ghosts are wealthy landlords suffering in death.
Vampires and Witches represent the power available if one (mostly women) just forsake all proprietary and God.
The old Indian Burial site aknowledges a bloody history.
Zombies bring doubt to the one certainty in life and shows how there are infinitely more dead than alive.
The haunted house on the hill is the life with the ideal white picket fence and 2.5 children.
And then there's the Backrooms. It's often discussed in the same vein as Analog and maybe SCP/X-Files horror. The anxiety of seeing familiar places neglected and the hubris of companies toying with things beyond them. We should have an aversion to it and watch it with a morbid fascination.
But it's not like that. Theres hundreds of fanworks and stories. Complete survival guides and spirited discussion on the semantics. There's games from low effort asset flips to dedicated RP communities. We all sort of want to fall into the backrooms. And I think it's because the idea of talks at many of our biggest aspirations.
A lot of the newer backrooms media includes this motief of buildings in the backrooms. A single furnished room. A badly proportioned house. A small neighborhood. An entire city. And thats the tip of the iceberg.
Millions of miles of empty space.
Infinite supply can only mean zero cost.
Maybe it's related to how people are becoming more socially isolated in general just as a matter of course--we just went through a huge pandemic, remote work is in higher demand, kids don't play...
Maybe it's related to how people are becoming more socially isolated in general just as a matter of course--we just went through a huge pandemic, remote work is in higher demand, kids don't play together around their neghborhoods anymore, third places are in decline, people are forming relationships with large language models... The backrooms is like all of that taken to its ultimate extreme, so it's like peering into our own possible future. Kind of like how space and alien themed science fiction saw a boom during the space race in the 50s and 60s, maybe empty liminal themed science fiction is seeing a similar boom in this modern age of increasing social isolation.
Amateur anthropologist here. I believe you're onto something. Are there many environments where one can feel more vulnerable than in the vastness of a boundless empty space? Perhaps this. There is...
Amateur anthropologist here. I believe you're onto something.
Are there many environments where one can feel more vulnerable than in the vastness of a boundless empty space? Perhaps this.
There is this sense of isolation: both dislocated from place, yes, but also sound and time. It is as though we are somehow nearly deaf and blind, hearing nothing yet seeing slightly differentiated yet nearly identical environments. The boundaries blend together. The absence of other cues guarantees disorientation.
Add to this a constructed/unnatural slightly dated/anachronistic environment. There is unrevealed intent here. It can be akin to seeing a person wearing a mask standing still in front of you. What is their intent? You can read neither their face or eyes. The ambiguity and uncertainty of the unmoving face leads to the typical human response to the unknown: fear.
Within this, there are elements of the familiar overwhelmed by a displaced ("surreal") homogeneity to the environment. In this place composed of seemingly infinite nearly indistinguishable boundaries and portals (themselves liminal spaces), it is the living entity that does not belong. We do not belong. We should not be seeing this place between. We need to leave. That we seem unable to, we are lost.
These backroom-like spaces introduce uncertainty to desolation with the addition of arbitrary boundaries. Around each boundary lies the unknown. With the addition of effective sensory deprivation, dread seems inevitable.
The sense of dreadful isolation within the nearly-familiar is, as you say, close to the worlds that we individually inhabit. Our own embodied experience is, after all, our truest reality.
As you say, this all seems a maximal extension
of the living/working conditions of teleworkers who live alone or work in an empty home. It relates to our current, and relatively newfound, for many, life experience. While this meme may speak slightly more to this class of professional, I suspect, based on the above, that it also resonates with most humans at all familiar with the real world analogs of these environments.
Gotta say, you got me there. Something about that ending reminded me of some of my favorite Reddit accounts that always turned a corner at the end of a long comment. Well played.
Gotta say, you got me there. Something about that ending reminded me of some of my favorite Reddit accounts that always turned a corner at the end of a long comment. Well played.
Super Eyepatch Wolf's video predates the release of Myhouse.wad, but if it did not I'm sure he would have featured it. I would highly suggest anyone interested in horror in liminal spaces to...
Super Eyepatch Wolf's video predates the release of Myhouse.wad, but if it did not I'm sure he would have featured it. I would highly suggest anyone interested in horror in liminal spaces to either play the game (well, Doom mod) or watch Power Pak's video on it - yes the video is on the long side, but the first ten minutes had me hooked. The video was shouted out by the author of House of Leaves and the mod draws some inspiration from it.
mild spoilers for Myhouse.wad, House of Leaves inspiration
There is a random chance for one of the house's closet doors to open into a dark corridor and maze similar to the one described in House of Leaves; I don't think the video shows it but there's a room with a gaping pit and an endless stairway downwards.
And that's just the more overt inspiration; perhaps YMMV but I think it's actually terrifying how doors and hallways appear just as you get used to the layout of the home.
There are also other callbacks to the more internet-famous liminal spaces but IMO done in a way that feels just right (unlike the many Backrooms-inspired video games).
I had a student job nearly 20 years ago, in a huge library. One of my tasks was to retrieve stuff in the underground archives. Apologies if my prose is bad, English isn't my first language :)
Now imagine. You're in the elevator, going down to -5, the doors open on this massive floor that someone only briefly showed you a few days ago. The fluorescent lamps of the central aisle automatically light up, and you begin walking. On your left and right are dozens of narrow rows of shelves, that are so long that the light can't reach the end. And you're there all alone, walking past these identical never-ending shelves that end in darkness, looking for some decades-old newspaper. The further you're going from the elevator, the more uneasy you are. You hope that the motion detectors all work so the lights don't suddenly go out.
But you're on the wrong floor, what you're looking for is actually in -6. So you take the service stairs down, and arrive on this floor that somehow looks even more oppressive. It's smaller, the ceiling is lower, the shelves are packed tighter, and at the end of the floor, in a corner, there is this massive metal door. It looks so out of place, what could be on the other side? But you don't dare open it, not a chance. You know ghosts and monsters don't exist, you're an adult, but you won't open this door.
A few days later, you go down again, but with another student, who also noticed this door, and also did not open it. But now you're not alone, so why not open it, just to peek? You unlock the heavy lever, and pull the door. There is a sudden draft with a howl, the wind almost closes the door by itself, as if you're the first ones to open it in years. And inside, there's literally nothing. An empty dark space of concrete floors and walls, that is only barely lit up by the light coming from the open door. You can't see past a few meters, so you close the door. You ask one of the librarians what's inside, what's the purpose of the heavy metal door, and they don't know. It's probably a maintenance access or something, but no-one knows.
Anyway, I'm going nowhere with this, but each time I see something about liminal spaces, I think of that floor and its never-ending shelves of decades-old books and newspapers shrouded in darkness. Actually when we were both there, it was the best place to chill. But we avoided -6.
Powerful imagery, shivers down my spine. That wasn't just good English. It was artful.
I'd hate to imagine what you'd think of us after a day as a fly on the wall in a UK school if this is standard requires excuse....
This isn't relevant to anything substantive in your comment, but I absolutely adore when people preface their comments with this and then proceed to write an artfully constructed comment in essentially flawless English. I don't know why it tickles me so much, but it does.
I even have a parody of the phenomenon I wrote years ago that springs to mind whenever I see it: "Please excuse my rough and unruly English, for I am but late-come to the tongue of fair Albion's shores..."
Thanks I guess 🤣
Ok my prose maybe isn't "bad" per se, but it's basic? I'll keep that joke in mind for the next time I write a longer comment!
"Basic" isn't at all a weakness in prose provided it's effective, and yours was.
If I absolutely had to find fault with your comment as an erstwhile copy editor of English, it would be in your inconsistent use of commas to delineate clauses. However, that's not really an issue with your English per se. If I had to guess, I'd wager you have similar habits when writing in your native language as well, assuming you use some form of the Roman alphabet. That's a stumbling block for orthography in pretty much every language that uses punctuation to set off various clause types.
In my exalted opinion, your written English appears to be at least as fluent as that of the overwhelming majority of native English speakers, so I'd put that anxiety to bed if it causes you stress.
Thanks a lot.
I'm gonna be fair, I've had similar experiences on floor 3 and 4 with some archival libraries so I can imagine being that far in a basement only enhanced that fun.
Honestly I enjoyed that feeling. I worked there for a month, three years in a row. I loved going to the archives, my imagination was going wild while I rationally knew I was safe.
When I was a grad student, we had a common office for all the first-year graduate students. Our office was located in the basement, but it still had a window, so we were at least graced with a sliver of natural light. However, the physics building had other offices that were relegated even farther underground and could only be accessed by a particular stairwell. I liked to jokingly refer to this area as the "sub-basement".
While wandering around the sub-basement one day (as a bored graduate student was wont to do) I came across a mostly abandoned hallway with some rooms at the end. At the end of one of these rooms was a door, which led to a small corridor, which lead to yet more rooms. In one of these rooms I found a door leading to a downward staircase. Curious, I climbed down the stairs to an unlit space, finding two small rooms with a few tables, some chairs, a couple whiteboards, and some nearly-empty bookshelves holding the occasional physics textbook. Nonplussed, I dubbed this area the "sub-sub-basement" and returned to the other graduate students to report my findings.
The discovery was a bit perplexing. As the space was much smaller than the rest of the floor above it, it must have lain between the foundations of the building, almost as if it had been squeezed into place. Stranger yet was its remoteness: unless one knew where to look, one would be unlikely to find this stairwell by happenstance. Therefore, as an office, it made no logical sense: Why did the architects feel compelled to build it? Why would one put an office in a place no one could find? How could one conduct office hours from here?
Evidently none of the other first-year graduate students had heard of the sub-sub-basement, so after I showed them to it, we decided to consult with our wiser nth-year seniors. "Oh right," one explained, "that place. Apparently that used to be the first-year office."
We’ll now I’m good and uncomfortable. That was fuckin creepy just reading about it.
The book he talks about, House of Leaves, looks really cool. And I say that as someone who doesn't like books or horror for the most part.
I'm probably about 60% of the way through House of Leaves, and have been for several months. It's a tough read--there are like three or four simultaneously running narratives (at least one of which hasn't grabbed me at all, so whenever that one comes up it feels like a bit of a slog), and there are passages with so many footnotes that the footnotes themselves are multiple pages longer than the actual passages they're footnoting (and those footnotes may also have their own footnotes). A lot of those footnotes also cite other books, talks, and papers, at least some of which are fictional in-world ones that don't actually exist (I suspect some of them are real citations to real works but even if that's true there are so many citations it'd be a full time job just figuring out which are which). The edition I have has passages in different colors and different fonts which all indicate different things, some passages are completely crossed out which indicates something else, and the whole thing is written in a way where the words and letters themselves are occasionally laid out in ways that mimic what's going on in the story (sometimes upside down, sometimes snaking their way around an otherwise mostly empty page, stuff like that) so can also prove physically difficult to read.
I absolutely love the idea of House of Leaves, which is why I picked it up and started reading it, but I'm not enjoying it as much as I hoped and not even sure I'll ever finish it.
House of Leaves is an absolute masterpiece. It's very hard going in parts (the encrypted parts are a little much) but it is worth it. The only thing I can compare it to is the paper equivalent of the films of David Lynch. It's much more uncanny than horrifying, I think.
Spot on as far as the audience experience, though I'm of the belief that their intents are polar opposites. House of Leaves is intended to be difficult, with the ergodic genre chosen specifically to that end. With Lynch, I get the distinct impression that the difficulty is more organic, and is the result of how he interacts with the world, rather than a choice. Which is neither really here nor there, I'm just a huge fan of both and enjoy discussing them with anyone who's willing.
That's an interesting point of view. I'm not sure I entirely agree about Danielewski's intent, but equally I have no way to argue against it either. He seems like a pretty weird dude, but I'm not sure there are many people who occupy the same weird league as Lynch does. I absolutely agree that Lynch's difficulty comes from his way of looking at the world and mediating that into film, rather than trying to be deliberately obtuse. David Lynch is such a deeply strange and wonderful man.
But while both are difficult, it's the uncanny nature of the texts which I find similar, and that's the same feeling I get with the backrooms stuff. Reading House of Leaves leaves me a little weirded the fuck out by reality for a few days in the same way that watching all of Twin Peaks in a weekend does. Nothing looks normal for a while. Every corner, every shadow, hides something bizarre and disturbing and magnetically fascinating and just out of sight.
Two House of Leaves things I usually mention in case people haven't heard of them:
Did you know there was a screenplay written for a House of Leaves TV series? Pilot episode script (link goes to PDF)
Also the tangential but still very much adjacent MyHouse.wad
Oh man, MyHouse.wad is so good! And thanks for reminding me about the screenplay, I had meant to read it years ago and it somehow fell off my radar.
And yeah, I have nothing much to back up my theories re: Danielewski, it's just a vague impression I get. Maybe it has something to do with his other works, none of which hit the same for me as House, whereas Lynch rarely misses. You're right that it's the uncanniness that links them though, I just tend to forget that difficult =/= uncanny in this context because for most people that seems to more or less be the case.
If you had to pick a band/album to go along with, what would it be (Poe's Haunted doesn't count lol)?
Edit: oh my god, what a day to have had this discussion. RIP David, you have left a hole in the world.
Ha, that's a great question. Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral seems a little obvious but I think it would work pretty well. Um.. how about Aphex Twin's Drukqs or RHY Yau's The Hidden Tongue. How about you?
I'm torn between Nurse With Wound's Gyllensköld, Geijerstam and I at Rydberg's and this fucking thing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7eF9F-RXCw
I feel like I could elaborate on that, but as a wise man once said, "no, I won't" lol.
House of Leaves is ... an experience ... or something. As noted by Rudism in their comment, there are a number of narratives going at once. And they overlap and kind of don't? It's a different kind of book and I will agree hard to get through. Some people call it post-modern fiction. I would maybe call it post-meta fiction.
That said, I did finish it and by the end I was blown away. Those narratives all do converge by the end, and honestly it leaves maybe more things hanging than you would expect.
Mild-ish House of Leaves spoilers - click to expand.
The fact that you have to work out, between the footnotes and other "extraneous" information presented in the book what is actually real (in book universe) and what is not, is something that I loved. I think there is probably enough information to really understand what happened, but it is not obvious. For example, even understanding where the story within the story came from isn't clear (this makes sense if you've read the book - I can't explain it better without writing out a few paragraphs of heavy spoilers for the entire thing).
It was honestly one of the least horror-y horror stories I've read. There are definitely some "hard" horror bits, but I think overall it's not really a horror story. I would probably lump it more into sci-fi than horror, but that's just me. As an unrelated aside, I do love the overlap of fantasy/sci-fi/horror and how there can be elements of any or all of those in any of them.
I've been trying to figure out why there's an almost romantic infatuations with the backrooms. I know there's the nostalgia factor but we didn't make an entire wiki dedicated to one post of a school or playground.
Looking back at previous waves of popular horror, the themes always reflected societal aspersions or/and anxieties. For example:
And then there's the Backrooms. It's often discussed in the same vein as Analog and maybe SCP/X-Files horror. The anxiety of seeing familiar places neglected and the hubris of companies toying with things beyond them. We should have an aversion to it and watch it with a morbid fascination.
But it's not like that. Theres hundreds of fanworks and stories. Complete survival guides and spirited discussion on the semantics. There's games from low effort asset flips to dedicated RP communities. We all sort of want to fall into the backrooms. And I think it's because the idea of talks at many of our biggest aspirations.
A lot of the newer backrooms media includes this motief of buildings in the backrooms. A single furnished room. A badly proportioned house. A small neighborhood. An entire city. And thats the tip of the iceberg.
Millions of miles of empty space.
Infinite supply can only mean zero cost.
Its Free Real-estate
Maybe it's related to how people are becoming more socially isolated in general just as a matter of course--we just went through a huge pandemic, remote work is in higher demand, kids don't play together around their neghborhoods anymore, third places are in decline, people are forming relationships with large language models... The backrooms is like all of that taken to its ultimate extreme, so it's like peering into our own possible future. Kind of like how space and alien themed science fiction saw a boom during the space race in the 50s and 60s, maybe empty liminal themed science fiction is seeing a similar boom in this modern age of increasing social isolation.
Amateur anthropologist here. I believe you're onto something.
Are there many environments where one can feel more vulnerable than in the vastness of a boundless empty space? Perhaps this.
There is this sense of isolation: both dislocated from place, yes, but also sound and time. It is as though we are somehow nearly deaf and blind, hearing nothing yet seeing slightly differentiated yet nearly identical environments. The boundaries blend together. The absence of other cues guarantees disorientation.
Add to this a constructed/unnatural slightly dated/anachronistic environment. There is unrevealed intent here. It can be akin to seeing a person wearing a mask standing still in front of you. What is their intent? You can read neither their face or eyes. The ambiguity and uncertainty of the unmoving face leads to the typical human response to the unknown: fear.
Within this, there are elements of the familiar overwhelmed by a displaced ("surreal") homogeneity to the environment. In this place composed of seemingly infinite nearly indistinguishable boundaries and portals (themselves liminal spaces), it is the living entity that does not belong. We do not belong. We should not be seeing this place between. We need to leave. That we seem unable to, we are lost.
These backroom-like spaces introduce uncertainty to desolation with the addition of arbitrary boundaries. Around each boundary lies the unknown. With the addition of effective sensory deprivation, dread seems inevitable.
The sense of dreadful isolation within the nearly-familiar is, as you say, close to the worlds that we individually inhabit. Our own embodied experience is, after all, our truest reality.
As you say, this all seems a maximal extension
of the living/working conditions of teleworkers who live alone or work in an empty home. It relates to our current, and relatively newfound, for many, life experience. While this meme may speak slightly more to this class of professional, I suspect, based on the above, that it also resonates with most humans at all familiar with the real world analogs of these environments.
On a personal level, my reaction: N-O-P-E!!!!
Gotta say, you got me there. Something about that ending reminded me of some of my favorite Reddit accounts that always turned a corner at the end of a long comment. Well played.
Super Eyepatch Wolf's video predates the release of Myhouse.wad, but if it did not I'm sure he would have featured it. I would highly suggest anyone interested in horror in liminal spaces to either play the game (well, Doom mod) or watch Power Pak's video on it - yes the video is on the long side, but the first ten minutes had me hooked. The video was shouted out by the author of House of Leaves and the mod draws some inspiration from it.
mild spoilers for Myhouse.wad, House of Leaves inspiration
There is a random chance for one of the house's closet doors to open into a dark corridor and maze similar to the one described in House of Leaves; I don't think the video shows it but there's a room with a gaping pit and an endless stairway downwards.And that's just the more overt inspiration; perhaps YMMV but I think it's actually terrifying how doors and hallways appear just as you get used to the layout of the home.
There are also other callbacks to the more internet-famous liminal spaces but IMO done in a way that feels just right (unlike the many Backrooms-inspired video games).