Writing the In-Between: The Haunting Pull of Liminal Spaces
Liminal spaces slip between the cracks of reality, drawing us in with their eerie, almost dreamlike quality. They exist on thresholds—places where one state hasn’t quite ended, and another hasn’t fully begun.
An empty motorway at dawn, stretching into mist. A hotel hallway, silent and endless, with every door shut tight. A school in the middle of summer, desks abandoned, corridors humming with the ghosts of yesterday’s voices.
These spaces unsettle us, but they also captivate. They feel paused, caught between moments, and that unease is exactly what makes them such a powerful tool in storytelling.
What Is a Liminal Space?
The word "liminal" comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. It describes a transitional place or time, something caught between one phase and the next.
Some are physical—waiting rooms, airports, stairwells. Others are temporal, like twilight or the unsettling stillness of early morning. Then there are psychological liminal spaces, the ones that exist in the mind. Moments of grief, uncertainty, or transformation. The feeling of being untethered, waiting for something to shift.
Liminality isn’t just about movement between states. It holds something deeper—a sense of suspension, as if time itself has paused to let you linger for just a little too long.
Where Liminal Spaces Hide
You’ve walked through them before, even if you didn’t realise it at the time.
A petrol station at 3 AM, flickering under sickly yellow light.
A town swallowed by fog, making everything beyond the next street vanish.
An abandoned shopping mall, music still playing over the speakers.
A hotel room that isn’t yours, untouched before you arrived and soon to be erased once you leave.
These places exist in transition. They aren’t destinations. They hold movement, but no permanence.
And that’s what makes them so effective in fiction.
Why Liminal Spaces Feel So Unsettling
Liminal spaces unsettle us because they disrupt expectations. They belong to the everyday, but something about them feels… wrong.
An airport should be filled with travellers, not deserted and silent. A school should echo with movement, not sit abandoned, desks untouched. A motorway with no cars, a town with no people, a hallway that stretches just a little too far—these things create a sense of unease, even if nothing explicitly threatening happens.
Our minds are wired to find patterns, to make sense of the world. When we enter a space that feels like it should be full of life but isn’t, the brain stumbles. That dissonance lingers, creating a quiet, creeping discomfort.
It’s a kind of horror that doesn’t need shadows moving in the dark. The space itself does all the work.
Liminal Spaces in Fiction: How to Use Them Effectively
Liminal spaces work in fiction because they create tension before anything even happens. Readers can feel the wrongness in the setting before a single unsettling event unfolds.
If you want to use them in your writing, try these techniques:
Make the setting disorienting—places that feel stretched, distorted, or slightly unreal. A town where the streets don’t lead where they should. A road that loops back on itself. A door that wasn’t there before.
Use liminality in time—set scenes during transitional moments. The hour before dawn, the first snowfall of winter, the last day of a dying season. These timeframes create a natural sense of unease.
Trap characters in psychological liminality—someone caught between choices, haunted by a past they can’t return to or a future they don’t know how to reach.
Let liminal spaces act as a doorway to something else—a shift in perception, a blurring of reality, a moment where something crosses over.
Some of the best horror stories lean into this. The Haunting of Hill House makes the house itself feel in-between, not quite part of the real world anymore. Silent Hill thrives on a town that doesn’t behave like it should. House of Leaves warps space itself, turning a hallway into something far more disturbing than just an empty corridor.
Liminality isn’t just about location. It’s about the feeling that something is slipping through your fingers.
Why We’re Drawn to Liminality
Liminal spaces exist in fiction because they exist in life.
That sense of floating between states? It’s something we all experience.
The weeks between finishing university and starting a new job.
The strange, restless days between Christmas and New Year.
The ache of waiting for a life-changing decision, knowing that once you hear it, everything shifts.
These moments aren’t just unsettling—they’re powerful. They force reflection, change, and uncertainty. That’s why we keep coming back to them in storytelling. They resonate because we’ve all been there, hovering between two versions of ourselves, waiting to see what comes next.
The Threshold Calls
Liminal spaces remind us that life doesn’t move in straight lines. The world is full of gaps, pauses, places where reality softens around the edges.
There’s something magnetic about them—whether it’s an empty road vanishing into fog or a character standing at the edge of something unknown. They pull us in, make us linger, and leave us feeling like we’ve stepped into a world where the rules don’t quite apply.
And that’s exactly why they belong in stories.
Have You Ever Experienced a Liminal Space?
That feeling of being somewhere that doesn’t quite feel real—a town that seemed too empty, a night that felt stretched beyond reason?
Drop a comment. I’d love to hear about it.