Interiors: Corridor of the Drake Hotel, Chicago, Illinois.

This is the second in my Interiors series. This photo of a hallway in the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago is an example of what is sometimes called a “liminal space.” In recent years, people have developed a fascination, particularly online, with liminal spaces such as corridors, waiting rooms or stockrooms, and a considerable horror-related mythology has sprung up around them. (For those of you who know what “The Backrooms” are, yes, I may eventually feature that in an entry in the Interiors series). I took this photo myself when I stayed at the Drake in March 2017 for a history conference.

Not to brag, but I was into liminal spaces before I even knew there was an internet mystique about them. Long linear corridors studded with doors appear over and over again in my fiction, and they are reminiscent of the corridors of ships which is perhaps why I like them. When I took this picture, I was intrigued not only by the visual—rectangles receding into infinity, like a Kubrick film—but the utter silence of the place. It’s not the ordinary silence of a quiet room or building, but a sort of dramatic, eerie, end-of-the-universe silence, like the “beige corridor” through time in my book The Valley of Forever, which you could say is the ultimate liminal space and the setting of the novel’s climax.