Let's Talk About The Backrooms
It's a Real Place; I've Been There
Last month, I read Scatter by Mindy Macfarlane on Kindle Unlimited. It's a novella that has been getting some attention in splatterpunk circles for its grotesque opening scene (modeled after the infamous Russian lathe video), but it stands out from its atrocity-on-every-page contemporaries for its Lynchian tone, thematic heftiness, and literary sensibilities. Of particular interest is the inspiration taken from the now infamous backrooms concept.
The backrooms meme stems from a photograph posted anonymously to 4chan in 2019 by an anonymous user. A second user added this ominous caption:
If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you
The original image is something that’s popular with admirers of the liminal spaces aesthetic. I’ve written about the concept of liminality in horror before, and the image of the backrooms is one of those things that lives rent-free in my head, something I think about at least once a day, despite the fact that I am not overly familiar with the mythos laid out in the wiki.
While a part of me gets excited when a mythos gets democratized by the internet and everyone and their aunt start adding to it, things often get unwieldy and silly rather quickly. Despite how much the image and what it evokes has been bastardized by a seemingly endless barrage of new ideas and creations, the image still remains effective. It stirs within me feelings of unease and, conversely, nostalgia.
Why? Well, that’s easy: I’ve been there.
In 2018, my mental health reached a breaking point, and I wound up spending a long weekend in a psychiatric hospital. I couldn’t tell you the one thing that led to this because, as I’m sure anyone who’s had such an experience knows, it’s never just one thing. During my time there, I attended group therapy, ate at the scheduled times, and stayed in my room, curled up and staring at the wall, letting the quiet do its thing. I also made sure to call my family.
After getting discharged, I spent the next year or so dreaming of inescapable houses and labyrinthine hallways. Sometimes, these places weren’t empty.
Sound familiar?
In 2021, I discovered the rabbit hole that is the musical genre of vaporwave, analog horror, the liminal spaces aesthetic, and the backrooms meme. It felt like coming home. The appeal of empty spaces and music from an idealized past made sense, as society coped with the pandemic and the fallout from it, but that’s just on the surface. From the rabid fandom of Stranger Things to the election of a popular 1980s real estate mogul, American society seemingly couldn’t get enough of nostalgia—namely nostalgia for a particular time period. It was the time period when I grew up, when I felt safe and happy. Carefree.
The media found inside this newly discovered rabbit hole—whether that be the imagery or the music—promises a way back home. There’s just one caveat: you must go back alone. And if you find you’re not alone, you should be very afraid.
There’s the cover for my latest, the long-awaited Barn Door to Hell. I’ve uploaded the files to IngramSpark, so now we wait. I’m insanely proud of how this book turned out. It’s the culmination not just of a year’s worth of writing, but of the last dozen or so years spent, honing my craft, learning the art of storytelling, and practicing. Like most of my work, it’s a novella, so I guess that length is just what I do.
Stay tuned for updates on its release. In the meantime, here are some recent books I enjoyed enough to recommend.
-Scatter by Mindy MacFarlane (mentioned above)
-Dr. Parasite by Rowland Bercy Jr.
*I put the asterisk next to When I Die because it is unapologetically extreme horror, ugly and at times hard to read. Not everyone who reads this newsletter can appreciate that kind of thing, so I wanted to get that warning out of the way. That said, good writing is good writing, and the story has plenty of nuance among the nastiness, so if you think you can handle it, give it a read. The other books have their icky moments, too, but Scatter is more focused on surrealism than splatter, and Dr. Parasite, while thoroughly disgusting, has a pulpy and often humorous tone.
If you check out any of these books, feel free to let me know what you think.
And speaking of reading, thank YOU for reading this newsletter. It means the world to me that some of you have been here since the beginning. I’m also grateful for my new subscribers, especially now that I’m only doing these once a month, as I stressed that doing less of these would make less people show up. Thankfully, the opposite has proven true.
Peace, friends. Be well.
Hello Lucas! My name is Sofia and I am an Anthropology student at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. I am currently working on a research project about the rise in popularity of liminal spaces online. I noticed you have posted a couple of articles on the subject and I was wondering whether you would be open to getting interviewed about your perspective on the phenomenon. If this is something that interests you and would like to know more, please send me a direct message so we can discuss further! :)
It's cool how the backrooms mythos started. Now they even have video games - hah! Vaporwave is a genre I too adore. I found out about it also quite recently.