“Niemandswasser,” “The “un-defined in Fiction,” and “Liminal Space”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance and over on my YouTube channel.
Through in-depth conversation with authors this column explores the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror and dark fiction, and more.
My short story collections with Cemetery Dance are full of the kind of stories that operate with Night Time Logic. My latest is called Phantom Constellations and is coming in November 2025.
With the release of my fourth short story collection, Creatures of Liminal Space, on my mind, the anthology Between Doorways caught my attention. I recently spoke with TJ Price about liminal space and the anthology.
We began our conversation with a question about the meaning liminal space to him.
DANIEL BRAUM: You mentioned that the anthology Between Doorways: Explorations Into Liminal Space was a community project brought together by a group of writers and creatives and that you were the one who chose the theme of explorations into liminal space. What does liminal space mean to you? How does that meaning carry over into fiction?
TJ PRICE: I have found that one of the most effective tools in fiction — especially in entries of those classified with the tag of “Weird” or “Horror” — is the art of doubt, or ambiguity. Unsettling via whispers or inexplicable compulsions, stories which tell of a sequence of events but only flirt at the origin from which they have slid, have always resonated with me. Far moreso, indeed, than stories which seem hell-bent on prizing apart the entire knot only to grimly lay out all the limp, untangled cords and step back, grunting in a kind of hollow self-satisfaction. Perhaps this is because I delight in challenge — a snobbish part of me perhaps thinks a knot which can be neatly undone must not be worthy enough to be tied — it would certainly explain why I chose to spearhead the construction and subsequent publication of this anthology largely of my own volition.
The concept of “liminal space” isn’t new. I might argue this conceit has been invoked countless times over the ages, both in and out of traditional genre spaces. A prime example of this is the oeuvre of writer Robert Aickman: the story “Niemandswasser” (German for “No Man’s Water”) comes to mind first and foremost, but there are many others which could also fit into the ‘liminal’ category. “Niemandswasser” takes its time getting to the critical action, but it is ostensibly concerned with a somewhat arbitrary point in the middle of a lake that is “beyond borders.” In the tale, it is wartime, and the narrator experiences a farrago of events that both contribute to and exacerbate the weird atmosphere in various ways. In a review of this story, Joanna Russ said that Aickman “…left out the parts of his horror stories which explain what is happening and why, thus achieving a mystifying non-compossibility…” (emphasis mine). This feeling of confusion, mistrust, betrayal, combined with a puzzlebox narrative, was my goal when I began curating this anthology. I wanted the writers to evoke with their stories a hazy, dim territory that cannot quite ever fully be mapped, and at whose corners amorphous shapes shift, conjuring dread and, hopefully, elation, in the readers’ minds.
Excellent to learn of how Aickman’s work connects to the inspiration and intent for the project, TJ.
In addition to your vision of liminal space you asked each of the writers to give a one-line sentence on what liminal space means to them. With those sentences you constructed an introduction, of sorts, called a “beforewords” and used those sentences to form the shape of a doorway. These definitions ranged from the poetic to the literal such as between the before and after and neither here nor there.
What were some of the author meanings that stood out to you and why?
I can’t really say as any of the responses that the authors shared stood out to me any more than the others. My goal with “beforewords” was to create a community-inspired introduction to the book in lieu of using a traditional foreword, as so many other anthologies do, often relying on the weight of the introduction’s author to drive promotions. What I wanted to do here was create a visually allusive design to “open” the book — in effect, literally creating a doorway (as you mention) between which all the stories would reside: thus, literally, “between doorways.” You may also have noted that the “beforewords” is oriented so as to “reflect,” with the phrase “liminal spaces” positioned in the direct center of the page. Each of the responses were manifested here by each of the authors involved. I took some liberties with the positioning and line-breaks to manifest this design — some words are crossed out, others are flipped, and all of these choices were made deliberately. For example, if one were to look at the “beforewords” straight on, as printed, in the bottom half of the page, the words “ANOMALY” and “HERE” are right-side up, which conveys a message of its own.
Though none of the answers given by the writers involved are specifically attributed, I do think that each provides a sort of legend (or “key,” if you will) to the themes and motifs of the stories that follow. Ideally, a reader would finish the book and, if they glance back at the “beforewords,” they might see new parallels between some of the sentences and the pieces they’ve just read.
You mentioned that while you controlled the theme and vision you did not retain the decision-making power to reject a story from anyone in the community of writers. What genres of stories were sent to you for the book? Were you expecting stories of horror?
Yes, you are correct — this project sprang up as a labor of love out of a community of writers from all points on the spectrum. Some folks who have been included in these pages have seen one or two publications, whereas others are seasoned and experienced, with multiple books to their name. The process was that I proposed the theme of the anthology, and then attempted to communicate my thoughts and feelings about my vision for the eventual book to those planning to write for it. I received all manner of stories for this project — as might be evidenced by the wide variety of subjects covered in the anthology, from stories set in liminal spaces like airports, hotels, graveyards, hospitals, et cetera — and each interpreted the theme in very different ways. I was pleased that the writers felt such freedom to write to their own particular strengths and interests. I would not like to assign genre tags to any of these pieces, as I find genre to be largely useless except as a marketing or promotional tool, or perhaps as fodder for critical theory when categorizing established work. I was, however, hoping that the authors would conjure stories that would evoke dread or unease (or some degree of ambiguous “non-compossibility,” to return to Joanna Russ’ term) given the theme, and I think everyone understood the brief quite well in those terms.
How do the definitions and meanings of liminal space related to and fit in to the horror genre or various sub-genres or related genres such as weird fiction?
Again, for the purposes of marketing and promotion, “liminal space” has a bit of recency bias when it comes to genre assignation. The most broadly-known “liminal space” is likely the concept of the Backrooms, which has pervaded the Internet and various social media platforms for some time now. Whereas the Backrooms is a great and creative example of the form, it does not fully encompass the possibilities inherent in the theme. Liminality, by definition, supersedes classification and label, typically exploring areas that are curiously undefined, or which hover in the gray areas between definitions. I think, due to the positioning of this particular anthology as liminal “spaces,” most of the authors gravitated to using this theme as setting or environment, which I could certainly see amplifying dread or fear when used in the horror genre.
So-called “weird” fiction often uses this level of ambiguity to evoke the uncanny when one is faced with the manifestation of the bizarre or inexplicable. In Weird Fiction: a Genre Study, Michael Cisco discusses the “deterritorialization” of the status quo, which again points to the concept of place — I might say that once the status quo is sufficiently “deterritorialized,” the remaining ruins are what we might term a “liminal space” — here nor there, neither true nor false, neither past nor future nor any present we can recognize. Such a space is ripe for fiction, as it is in these nebulous areas to which the bizarre is drawn. Once something familiar is stripped of its familiarity — whether through a long corrosion of time and circumstance (as in nostalgia’s warp) or a sudden and anomalous transgression of the supernatural (as in the appearance of a portal, or the presence of a h a l l w a y where none should be) — what remains is a grotesque caricature, something unheimlich, categorized by a dissonance of belief versus empirical proof.
One of the standout stories in the book is “The Hole Had Always Been There” by Rebecca Cuthbert. In the story there is a literal, physical, liminal space – the hole and tunnel in the cemetery wall. And also the liminal space of loss and grief. How do the two intersect and interact in the story?
Rebecca’s story is a prime example of the liminal space occupying multiple dimensions in fiction, not to mention the transcending of genre. Though the story concerns a physical liminality and involves a supernatural element, it is very much rooted in the emotional and developmental limbo of the narrator, who is, as you’ve noted, mired in grief. In this case, loss is the transfiguring factor for the narrator: the status quo of their life as they know it has been upended by death. Now, something which was once familiar, even comforting, has become uncanny. The crux of this story comes in how Davey chooses to perceive this presence, and in which manner they disembark the threshold they’ve found themselves upon. In this, Davey is metaphorically between doorways, given the choice of two portals: behind door number one, there is the real pain of grief, a disrupted status quo, and the fear of having to cope with loss. Behind door number two, however, there is a perception of solace, of unworldly continuance, even though that solace is unnatural and may even pose a threat. Rebecca does all this in the space of very few words, which is impressive — the story is only around 1,600 words total — and with literary flair, telling the story in a close third-person perspective that evokes dramatic irony as well as real pathos by the end.
Another story in the collection that does this excellently is “The Death Factory,” by Carson Winter — and it shares the investigation of another liminal space: its narrator also hesitates on the threshold of adolescence, just as Davey does in Rebecca’s piece. In “The Death Factory,” Carson uses a horrific metaphor as a stand-in for the cryptic (and often bizarre) rituals of adulthood, as witnessed by the young. This story, too, is very much about the loss of innocence, and the implications thereof, especially when juxtaposed with fetishized worship.
Whereas there are many stories in the book that deal specifically with this tumultuous and hazy stage of life, there are also those which deal specifically in nostalgia as a liminal space, something which can often corrupt memory, causing it to become either unreliable or even completely incorrect. An anecdote I once read tells of an elderly German man who has returned to the scene of his childhood, buoyed by memories of the bucolic riverside. Overjoyed, he rushes to the water and splashes it on his face, only to begin screaming in agony. In the intervening years, you see, there had been a factory built upstream, and its pollutants had rendered the water toxic.
In both “Fun-a-Lot,” by Demi-Louise Blackburn, as well as “The Last Carnival,” by Caleb Stephens, both protagonists struggle with the corruptive force of nostalgia. “Fun-a-Lot” concerns an abandoned play centre, and the trespass of its narrator and their friend, who become subject to distortions of the supernatural to tragic effect. Both characters in “Fun-a-Lot” hover on the brink of graduation, too — entering into a summer that stretches out into an unknown future, where the regularity and routine of high school is no longer present. With hallucinatory, imagistic prose, Demi-Louise’s story takes nostalgia to its limit, presenting not just memory as unreliable, but also the present, and the future, as well.
In Caleb Stephens’ “The Last Carnival,” we see this same effect, but from the other angle: it tells of a man who is entering his twilight years, on a pier near an old amusement park. Right from the jump, we have liminality in the setting — a pier (neither shore nor ocean, but something in between) and an abandoned amusement park, no longer amusing. Caleb physicalizes the force of nostalgia here via the image of a cherished photo album, underlining the creeping ravages of time on identity and attachment. The person that the narrator used to be is no longer who they are, and Caleb shows this to devastating effect by describing how the pages of the photo album become blackened and melted, removing the only empirical evidence which establishes the protagonist’s past. Without this past, there is no present, argues Caleb, and certainly no future.
Another standout story is “The Halls” by Christi Nogle. The story features a supernatural liminal space, the titular halls, as well as being set in a physical liminal space of a convention hotel. Can you please tell us about these liminal spaces? And how they relate to the liminal space in the character’s life?
Christi is one of my favorite working writers, and her forays into the liminal have always excited my brain. She often uses setting or environment to uncanny effect — (see her excellent story “The Rooms Behind the Kitchen” in Haven Spec Magazine, or “Night, When Windows Turn to Mirror” in her collection One Eye Opened in That Other Place. I was elated when she sent me “The Halls,” as it engages with portals and passages as well as reiteration and memory, all of which echo beautifully through the surreal events of the protagonist’s journey. By the end of the story, there’s a subtext about artistry and nurturing that has developed quietly — but, as with all of Christi’s work, I could return to this piece again and again and constantly discover new resonance, or themes I might’ve missed on a first go-round.
In Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Eerie, the two title states are discussed as two distinct modes of fiction, both having to do with either presence of absence — Fisher defines the “weird” as the presence of something that doesn’t belong, something superfluous or unexplainable, whereas the “eerie” is defined as either a failure of presence or a failure of absence. Christi invokes both of these modes in her story, juxtaposing the titular “Halls” as something that is both where it shouldn’t be as well as something that is oddly devoid of anything else.
This theme of passage is present in quite a few of the other stories, among them S.E. Denton’s “Portal” and RSL’s “The Wings.” In “Portal,” Denton tells of two men — former child stars corrupted by fame, now grown apart. One of them is plagued by addiction and nostalgia — not to mention a strange spot at the end of a hallway in their Laurel Canyon home — and the other is struggling not to be dragged into the maelstrom of the past. In a way, the dark spot is metaphorical, underscoring the delicate relationship the two have with one another, but also symbolic of their toxic bond. We all have these kinds of people in our lives, those who serve as fixed points in our memory, and yet—as in the anecdote mentioned before, they can also serve as pollutants in that river, and one can end up scarred . . . or worse.
RSL takes the concept of the h a l l w a y s quite literally in “The Wings,” which serves to close the door on the anthology (if you will.) An Event has occurred wherein doors of various colors abruptly appear, randomly, around the world. As the phenomenon continues — and as some doors are opened — theory and reality intersect, entangling the lives of three different people standing simultaneously (and paradoxically) at the same and yet also in disparate doorways. The story is told through the eyes of a fourth party who serves as interviewer — a lurker on each of their thresholds — who subtly draws parallels between them and tugs them further and further toward a vanishing point none of them can see coming.
Which story in the book stands out to you and why?
That’s a tough question to answer — an editor, I try never to play favorites, but I’d have to say that the story which stands out the most to me in this book is “Phantom Islands,” by H.S. Wollmer. The story concerns the practice of cartographers to insert fictitious geographical entities into their maps to “mark” them as their own work. H.S.’s story, however, investigates what might happen if someone were to follow a map to this allegedly fake place only to discover that it does, in fact, exist — though not at all in the realm of the familiar — and is inhabited by those who have “disappeared” from the context of the real world. Crucially, the story (at its narrative apex) makes use of the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s now-classic axiom: “The map is not the territory,” signaling that the abstraction of a thing is not directly analogous to the thing itself. The story is told in the form of recovered journal entries, and it ends ambiguously, in mid-sentence, gesturing towards the protagonist’s assimilation into those who have “disappeared” into this liminal place of “not-map” and “not-territory.”
I can see how that fits in with the puzzle box intention you mentioned earlier. Was there a liminal space you wanted to see an author write about but was not submitted, and why?
I tried to go into this with as little expectation as possible, due to the breadth of possible interpretations on the theme, and was pleasantly surprised by how creatively each author responded, even when settings repeated. Some of these overlaps in the anthology were completely serendipitous, too — note how “Queue,” by Julie Sevens, set in a never-ending line chugging peristaltically through the bureaucracy of airport customs, ends with the image of a “bubble, circling the drain.” Note also how the next story, “Out of Context,” by Alex Wolfgang — also largely set in the liminal maze of an airport — revolves around what its characters call their “bubble,” referring to their perspective on traveling in a foreign country and the limitations of their own perspective on the world around them. Neither of the writers corresponded in any way with one another during the writing of their stories, but the images were immediately resonant for me, and so they formed the “center” of the book — paired bubble, floating in the endlessness between doorways.
There are other echoes as well, which I tried to amplify via sequencing and structure, but I will let those be heard without drawing attention to specific examples.
If you were to write about a liminal space what would that space be and why?
Perhaps tellingly, the most liminal space that I can think of is the UNFINISHED folder I keep on my hard drive, populated by the forlorn ghosts of stories begun but which yet remain incomplete. I think liminal spaces are everywhere, sometimes even unavoidable, in most fiction — be it genre space, or otherwise. There is nowhere more ripe for dramatic conflict and the evolution of narrative toward climax than the uncanny or the undefined. A relationship in flux, teetering on the brink of oblivion? Grief, wherein the protagonist is unmoored in a place between the shores of life and death? These are all places where someone has opened a door and stepped beyond. Even this space, the internet — now undeniably enmeshed in our everyday lives — can serve as an amorphous zone of transition. In one way or another, we are all between doorways, and there is only so long one can be presented with a doorway before the thought occurs:
Is it an entrance, or an exit?
There’s only one way to find out: cross the threshold.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
TJ PRICE currently serves as Assistant Editor at Haven Speculative Magazine, and has performed in an editorial capacity for various anthologies in the past, such as Collage Macabre: an Exhibition of Art Horror. He also served as editor for Emma E. Murray’s début collection of short fiction, The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions, as well as the anthology Odd Jobs: Six Files from the Department of Inhuman Resources.
Between Doorways can be ordered at Salt Heart Press.
He is currently editing Straw World and Other Echoes from the Void, Erik McHatton’s début collection, due out in September 2025. His own work has been published in such venues as Nightmare Magazine, PseudoPod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Archive of the Odd. In addition, he has published a mixed-media novelette, The Disappearance of Tom Nero; he is also currently a staff writer for 3 Quarks Daily. He may be invoked — though the summoning may often cause mild hallucinatory effects in the unwary — at tjpricewrites.com.
DANIEL BRAUM writes “strange tales”, intentionally ambiguous stories in the tradition of Robert Aickman that evoke the old Twilight Zone shows. His stories, set in locations around the globe, explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural.
An illustrated volume of his work titled Creatures of Liminal Space, featuring illustration and design by Dan Sauer, is available at Jackanapes Press.
His all-new short story collection Phantom Constellations is coming in Autumn 2025 from Cemetery Dance Publications.
More about him can be found here.
