Book 1 · Nonfiction, 120 pages
Liminal Spaces
Why Empty Malls, Hotel Corridors and Pools at Night Feel So Strange
You know the feeling even if you have never had a name for it. A food court ten minutes before opening. A hotel pool at seven in the morning. A school corridor over summer break. Nothing is wrong. Everything is clean, lit and ready. And something still registers as off.
Liminal Spaces goes behind the pictures the internet can't stop sharing and explains what is really going on when a familiar place turns strange.
Hardcover and paperback coming in November.
120 pages, 6 x 9 in. More than forty real photographs, black and white in print, color in the ebook. Source notes for every chapter.
From the opening
The lights in the lobby are on. The oval panel in the ceiling glows like a skylight, and the lamps at the ends of the sofas are lit. A lobby like this is built for turnover: people coming in from the street, sitting down to wait, glancing at the time, getting up again. Nobody in the picture is doing any of that.
The room also belongs to another time. The starburst chandeliers, the tiled basin and the octagon carpet are a style most of us would place decades back. Even if we know when the photograph was taken, the room can feel suspended in an earlier version of everyday life.
What is in the book
Sixteen chapters
- The food court before opening and the lobby with every light on: rooms set for people who haven't arrived
- Hotels at night, including the Colorado hotel where, by Stephen King's own account, he and his wife were the only guests on the night The Shining began
- Pools with no swimmers, and the pumps that keep running for a crowd that isn't coming
- Airports and stations, and the Berlin airport that stood lit for years without a passenger
- Dead malls, theme parks out of season, and why the places of childhood seem bigger in memory
- How a photograph posted to an anonymous message board in 2019 became the Backrooms
- Why the same empty room can frighten one person and calm another
A look inside
Two of the book's photographs, as they appear in the black-and-white print edition. More than forty in all, each credited, none generated by AI.
Who is this book for?
Anyone who scrolls liminal-space pictures late at night, grew up in malls that have since closed, or notices how strange a familiar place becomes when everyone leaves. It draws on psychology, architecture, history and internet culture, and it explains what you are feeling and why, without jargon. Source notes for every chapter.
Read it with Liminal Spaces Photography, the full-color field guide to taking pictures like these yourself. Or start with the free reading on this site: what a liminal space is, twenty-five examples, and the Backrooms explained.
Details
Paperback ISBN 978-1-923893-72-6. Hardcover ISBN 978-1-923893-73-3. Ebook ISBN 978-1-923893-74-0. 6 x 9 in, 120 pages. Author: Aaron Wells.
Hardcover and paperback coming in November.