by J. R. Blanes
It’s the last night of StokerCon. The crowd gathers at the after party in the lobby of the Stamford Hilton, drinking cocktails, congratulating the Stoker Award winners, and saying goodbye to friends both new and old. I run into Hilary Wilson, a folklore podcaster I’d befriended a day earlier. She has this nefarious grin on her face. “Have you seen the Liminal Space?” she asks. I have no idea what she’s talking about but, as a horror writer, I’m intrigued. My friend points around a curved wall. “It’s right back there. You want to see?” My wife begs me not to go. There’s a joke in my family that we’ve inherited a curse, so she’s cautious about allowing me to interact with haunted places. But there’s no way I’m going to walk away from this adventure.
I’m led through a pair of steel doors, barely cracked open, into what looks like an abandoned lounge. Loose wiring and burnt insulation droops from exposed ceiling tiles; it immediately puts me in mind of a mechanical tentacled creature straight out of Lovecraft. Hanging on a wall is a folk horror painting of a twisted branch sprouting blood red apples: the devil taunting us to explore further. In a closet, a light fixture crackles and flickers above a single folding chair, the ideal torture chamber from the movie Saw. Some of us strike Instagram-worthy poses, making ghoulish faces or pretending we’re dead.
Ghostly black-and-white photos of businesspeople lead the way along a darkened corridor, their eyes following us as we investigate deeper. Who are these apparitions and why were they hidden here? Do they haunt this hotel? Voices whisper the floor numbers as the elevators descend. Still, we don’t allow them to chase us away. We are fear junkies. Our adrenaline piques at the prospect of the next jump scare around the corner.
Down a dimly-lit hallway, we find a rust-tinted goo smeared across the linoleum flooring. Is it blood from bodies dragged to the incinerator in the kitchen? Ectoplasm? Monster fluid? We each have our opinion. All we know is we must tell others.
This is a horror convention, after all.
Soon, more of us are entering the liminal space, so named for the transitional area that exists between one defined state and another. As I flew back early the following morning, I thought of my entire weekend at StokerCon as a Liminal Space.
It was in this liminal space that I entered the Dealers Room and struck up a conversation with a local Connecticut author, Joe. Over the next few days, I got to know this author so well, I felt like we’d been friends forever. We shared advice about writing and marketing books. We’d grab beers and relate stories from our personal lives: his in small town Connecticut and mine in Chicago. One evening, we headed into Stamford for dinner and, while following another friend’s GPS, we got lost in a parking garage then inside a mall, running up and down the escalators, laughing as we searched for the exit. It was like being teenagers again after your parents dropped you off untended: that feeling of freedom you lose once responsibilities strip you of youth.
It was in this liminal space that I met a group of strangers outside the whispering elevator who told me about The Lamp Room. In another place and time, I might have thought they were members of a cult, but here they were compatriots who thrived on the unusual. We went up to the tenth floor where we looked through a peep hole at the bizarre foyer of lamps, laughing at the absurdity of such a thing in a luxury hotel. The Lamp Room, along with The Whispering Elevator and The Nightmare Room, would become folklore among the attendees. If you didn’t experience them directly, you definitely heard about them, through word of mouth or blog.
It was in this liminal space that I swapped stories about the mattresses clogging the hallway on the fourth floor. (The hotel decided a busy con was the perfect weekend to change the mattresses in all the bedrooms. Maybe there was too much ectoplasm on them.) My wife and I were forced to traverse this maze of springy bedding, hoping we didn’t get lost on our way to our room. Eventually, we had to ask one of the movers to create a path for us. For rescuing us, I offered them Mothman eggs I bought at the Curioporium in Southington.
It was in this liminal space that I had a conversation with my idol Adam Nevill about a scene he wrote about a nail board and an eyeball (it’s as traumatizing as it sounds). It was in this liminal space where I told author Tamika Thompson, who’s researching her next book, about a gothic fortress in Chicago owned by the American Academy of Anti-Aging. It was in this liminal space that I met with my publisher Richard at Ruadán Books in person for the first time, a significant step in my transformation to “a real author.” It was in this liminal space that I cheered with glee alongside the rest of the audience listening to panels on the final girl and stories about knitting varicose veins.
It was in this liminal space that, for a brief weekend, I forgot about the atrocities going on in our country. I forgot about the stress of work. I forgot about moving to a new home in a month. I forgot about the stress. Because, in this liminal space, there was only fun. A community brought together by their shared love of the dark and the weird.
A week has passed since StokerCon ended, and I’ve returned to normal life. Yet I can’t stop thinking about the liminal space. I have dreams about looking for a famous author’s lost cup of coffee. I’ve connected with the friends I met there through social media. I’m reading the books I bought there. I’m browsing photos posted about our shared experience. I’m wishing I could be back there…if only for another day.
I can’t wait for the next StokerCon. The liminal space will not be the same, but that’s part of the adventure.
