Creatures of Liminal Space by Daniel Braum
Jackanapes Press (June 2025)
The Synopsis
Daniel Braum’s Creatures of Liminal Space explores the spaces in between places and the strange, weird, and numinous encounters you might have there. In this collection, you will find three short story length selections of Braum’s hallmark strange tales (including one original to this book), interspersed among twelve dark and wondrous flash fiction length selections. Braum and illustrator Dan Sauer invite you to traverse these labyrinths of the liminal, and join them on a phantasmagoric journey replete with dark and ethereal denizens haunting exotic borderlands far-flung and shadowy corners just next door.
Discover the heartbreaking secrets of a Loch Ness Monster sighted in the lush jungles of Central America.
Learn who or what the enigmatic Jaguar King is protecting with the wild cats of a remote swath of tropical forest.
Traverse patterns of love and loss and time—and learn if our friendships and truths, like constellations of stars, are real or perceived.
Ghosts. Hauntings. Monsters. Creatures. Cryptids. Fear. Darkness. Loss. Wonder. Heartbreak. Mystery. The Strange. The Uncanny. The Liminal. The Interstitial. Labyrinths of time. Love and Desire. The edges of civilization. Longings for the lost.
(Interview conducted by Rick Hipson)
Daniel Braum is best known for his unique brand of quiet horror, opting to invoke a sense of wonder over a sense of dread. However, don’t let his subtlety fool you; many if his characters, while finding themselves lost between realms of reality and other worldly dimensions, often find allure in the darkest and most desperate places.
Hot on the heals of his highly acclaimed collection The Night Marchers (and Other Strange Tales), Creatures of Liminal Space offers a collection of flash fiction and long fiction that will stretch your perspective and open up your minds eyes to that liminal space beyond the shroud of common existence as you enter a world of existential “what ifs.” The collection is also beautifully coupled with interpretive art work from Dan Sauer of Jackanapes Press, further elevating the sensory impact of each tale.
Daniel was kind enough to pause from his otherworldly adventures long enough to discuss what it truly means to create from a point of limitless space, his process of putting together a collection representing many years of his own creative and personal growth, and what makes his brand of story telling fit so well within the vast scope of dark fiction.
CEMETERY DANCE: By definition, Daniel, liminal space is a transitional state, time or a place that exists between two defined points. It’s the in-between, the threshold, the pause before a new beginning. For as existential as that all sounds, what does the concept of a liminal space have to do with the way you personally navigate the world?
DANIEL BRAUM: Well, what a great and thoughtful question. I appreciate it. The answer to that is I’ve always been aware as an artist, as a creative person, that’s the space where, at least for me, and I think for a lot of other artists too, that’s where that magic happens. That’s where the creativity comes from. I think the most down-to-earth way to say it is my ideas come to me when I “let go of the wheel,” like when I’m in the shower. I always untied the knot for a story when I went for a walk, or I went for a jog. For me, liminal space is so important to protect as an artist ’cause that creative space is where the magic really happens for me.
If I can expand on that question a little bit as it relates to your craft, what is it about liminal space that makes it such a fertile focus of so many of your stories?
I think why I’m drawn to it is I’m drawn to stories that have strong and defined conflicts and I’m drawn to stories that have choices. I feel like characters who are in these in-between places, characters who are off balance, or characters who are between here and there in that place in their character arc or in their life arcs, that’s where the good stuff, the real drama comes from.
Yeah, a hundred percent. As soon as I saw the title for this collection, I thought, “wow!” That kind of nails your writing style right on the head. Have you always been aware that so much of your ambiguous writing style stems from a place of liminal space, or is your approach to your storytelling more of a developed skill which you’ve honed over time?
You know, I feel like when I first started, I was operating without technical awareness. I just knew what I liked as a reader. I didn’t have any lingo or knowledge of genre or craft. I just knew like, hey, I like those kinds of stories where you and I can watch that movie and we could be like, Hey, did you love that psychological horror? Hey, did you love that ghost story? And we can both argue about it and both be right. That’s why I call it intentional ambiguity. And I love that. consciously or subconsciously, I always just wanted to write that way.
Right around when The Night Marchers was acquired by Cemetery Dance was when I started to become more aware of that in the lineage of horror, in the lineage of craft and the lineage of technique. So, to answer your question, yeah, I was a bit (aware). I think, especially now, I’m in the place of where it’s being honed and intentional, but when I started, I was just flying by the seat of my pants.
Gotta be honest.
That’s great. You recently shared with me — and this kind of blew my mind and made me feel pain for you — that when you set out to put this collection together, you had forty-eight stories to choose from. It must have been a tough task to whittle them down to just 12 stories for your final selection.
Can you walk us through the process, assuming you didn’t just close your eyes, plaster your wall with all these titles, and throw darts to see where they landed.
I wish I had done that! I’ll keep it as brief as I can. ’cause it’s an answer spanning decades. About 15 or 20 years ago. I was writing for a project called The Daily Cabal. It was helmed by one of my favorite authors, and one of my favorite friends and colleagues, Rudi Dornemann, and what this was, was a few dozen or so authors from around the planet, quite literally around the planet. A couple of times a year would be your day. All right, Daniel Braum, February 2nd, you have to put a story on this web blog. And over the course of years, I accumulated forty-eight or so stories. I thought they were lost to time, you know? Life goes on, the website moved on. During the pandemic, I reached out to Rudi for help in finding those stories again, and he was able to recover the stories for me !
It was such a wonderful thing to be reunited with these flash fictions. Fast forward to a year ago, to when publisher and illustrator Dan Sauer is putting together Creatures of Liminal Space. It was going so well, and we were just getting down to the nuts and bolts and the logistics and he was like, Hey, I have “X “amount more space in this book. Do you have more stories? Do we have more content? I said that I didn’t have any full-length short stories that I could put in there. I do have another book coming out from Cemetery Dance in the fall, so everything is allocated between the two books, but I thought, I do have these flash fictions so I’ll see how those can be integrated into the book. At that point I knew, okay, we’re gonna fill up that space. And it was not just filling up space, but we’re gonna integrate these stories. The one thing I will say, it wasn’t as painful as like, oh, leaving them behind, because I did look at them through a lens. We already knew that the book was gonna be called Creatures of Liminal Space, so the criteria of making those forty-eight become 10 or 12 was, does it have a creature? Does it have something about liminal space? Does it have both? That’s how our shortlist came to be. Then the list became a lot shorter, and then at that point I was able to pick them thematically and a couple, a couple did have to go, but maybe they’ll find a new life elsewhere.
While you were deciding which of your stories were going to be going into this collection, were there any stories that you did find were really difficult to leave on the cutting room floor that also happened to match your specific criteria? Bonus points for telling us why they were still cut.
You know, at first it felt right, and I thought I did have the right mix throughout the process, which is always hard. Just the other day I was showing the proof to a friend, and they mentioned something, and I said, oh, I have a story about that, and it was not in the book. We were talking about a specific bird called an Ibis and there was a story about an Ibis and apparently, I thought it was in the book, but it was one of the ones which I cut. I guess that I thought I was gonna have an easy answer and say, nope, it was a real easy process. It felt right. But no, I guess there were some “children” that didn’t make it into the book that I just blocked out that I thought they’re in there, but they’re not.
Did you happen to have about a dozen that did meet your criteria? I mean, not to make you feel like you’re a bad story parent who just happened to love abandoning his own children just because you could, but is there a specific reason that you stopped at just 12 stories? Couldn’t you have squeezed in a few more in there?
Great question. It came down to the aesthetics. When we knew we were gonna put this flash fiction in, it became, well, how is this book gonna come together? Is it gonna be flash fiction? Is it gonna go in size order, alphabetical order, art order? I envisioned the book with the three “long short stories,” Dan’s art, and then I said, wait a minute — three flash fiction, a long story, three flash fiction, a long story, and so on. So, the book has this sort of rhythm and shape with that. When you get a chance, to see the way Dan’s illustrations go along with the collection, it really felt like the right choice. It was at that point the 12 was purely aesthetic about making the book have the right visuals and feel like it had the right shape to it. In that way, it was an easy choice.
Perfect. And I do wanna talk to you about Dan’s illustrations and the collaborative effort that you both did for the book. Certainly, two rights will make a right, but obviously two Dan’s very much make a book. That was a terrible pun, but I had to do it.
No, I love it because working with Dan was awesome on so many levels. Highest, highest marks for Jackanapes Press and Dan Sauer.
If I’m being honest, I think the market needs a lot more flash fiction out there. I’ve heard it stated before that — I think it was actually Jack Ketchum who mentioned it although I’m sure you know it’s a pretty common statement — that a novel is very much like a long-term relationship, whereas short stories are more like a fast burning one night stand.
How do you feel flash fiction fits into the spectrum of storytelling as somebody who reads them and, of course, writes them?
Wow, that sounds like a Jack Ketchum quote right there. For me, the flash fiction, it really takes a lot of work to get an idea to fit into that small footprint.
That makes sense. Maybe a flash story, when it works, can be compared to a single kiss that has the power to linger and leave a long-lasting impression.
I think for as a writer, when I’m trying to do it and to make it feel satisfying, I’m looking at the flip side of what makes a flash fiction satisfying to me as a reader. I think that comes down to character conflict and setting and for a short story or novel, you’ve got a lot of room to develop those, even though I like to get those upfront. But, when you’re looking at 500 words, maybe a thousand words max, how can you get character conflict and setting? How can you get a beginning, middle and end? That’s where I think the art of it comes into play. There’s no one answer. I think it’s just interesting structures and interesting ways to make it satisfying, as a reader, to (be able to) come back and be like, wow, I just had this little thing, but I felt like I went somewhere. I felt like I knew someone, or I felt like something happened. I feel like it’s the most challenging of the art forms.
Absolutely. And it’s so rewarding, so satisfying, when you nail it, both as a writer and as a reader.
I’ll put it out there, like, to go back to your last question about making that forty-eight become 12, a lot of times, at least by my own standards, a lot of times I feel like I miss the mark.
When I recovered those forty-eight stories, when re-reading some of them I was thrilled. I’m like, wait a minute, this is actually good. But for every good one I looked at others and I’m like, that was a nice try, but it missed that dartboard. That was a good one, but I don’t think it really came to life I‘m excited for readers to get their hands on them and to see what comes to life for them, what doesn’t.
Speaking of helping things come to life, I’ve always loved stories that have illustrations to accompany them, whether it’s fully illustrated, such as your or there’s occasional illustration maybe as a chapter break or what have you. Can you talk some more about your collaboration with Dan Sauer and his artwork for your book? Did you just kinda say, Hey Dan, here’s my stories, run wild with whatever you think is a good fit, or was there any kind of a back and forth?
You know, this one was really easy ’cause I got the words, he’s got the images. I did cheat a little bit ’cause I’ve worked with Dan so many times before and I know his process. I definitely don’t wanna call it a collaboration because the magic is all Dan. But when we did finalize this list, I gave him a list of the stories, and I cherry picked a few images and put them out there for Dan. Dan does these photorealistic, mosaic collages and I know that’s the way he’d be looking at the stories, looking for usable images, so I did try to pick out these little images just as a starting place for him, but everything after that is just him, his imagination and his lens on how he looked at the story, and it’s such a delight to see this. If you go to the Jackanapes Press website I think he’s got a bunch of them up there under the Creature of Liminal Space tab.
Oh, that’s great, Daniel. Between the beautiful illustrations and the stories what are you hoping readers take away from the experience of this fantastic and varied collection?
As an author, I want people to come away with that same experience they have when they’re reading my strange tales, that Twilight Zone experience.
You hit it on the head by saying this book is different because when I was proofing it, the fact that it has the different length stories, the fact that it has these illustrations, the fact that it was designed by Dan Sauer so well, I feel like you can experience this book in a lot of different ways.
If you wanna just dig into a deep story, I think they’re technically not quite novels, but they’re novelettes. They’re beefy, and they’re long stories so you can have that intellectual word experience and dive into a long story. Or, if you’re like me and at the end of the day your eyes are tired, you can flip through it and — I just went through it one night to see the sequence of Dan’s visuals, if you just want that, like you said, that little kiss or that little snack. You don’t have to read it in order. You could just jump into a flash fiction or two. For me, that’s very different. I never had a book quite like this, and that was really rewarding for me to experience it like that, and I hope some of the readers might experience it like that, too.
Order your copy of Creatures Of Liminal Space
Watch and listen to Daniel read two flash stories-one from his collection and one exclusive
Daniel Braum’s forthcoming fifth short story collection, Phantom Constellations, can be ordered from Cemetery Dance Publications.
