life in the backrooms

what can we learn from the labyrinth in the age of uncertainty?

Does this picture mean anything to you?

If not, I apologise. As you will soon come to understand, it’s one of those images that, once-glimpsed, you can never un-see. If you’re anything like me and millions of other people, it will linger on in your mind; or possibly consume it. It’s the first known image of The Backrooms — a blandly unsettling disused office space of indeterminate location where (according to internet folklore) it’s possible to slip from reality (“un-clip” in gaming parlance) and find yourself trapped, possibly forever, wandering from room to virtually identical room whilst being predated by a faceless monster known as “the entity.”

The Backrooms have been on my mind lately because the whole world has begun to feel like a familiar-but-disorientating maze from which we cannot escape. Perhaps it’s always felt this way to a greater or lesser extent? Labyrinths, both figurative and literal, are nothing new after all. The maze first appeared in the Greek myth of the architect Daedalus who built a classical labyrinth on the ancient isle of Crete, a kind of purpose built prison which King Minos imprisoned his wife’s ornery, inter-special bastard son, the Minotaur, who was eventually killed with great effort by the hero Theseus.

Whether, how and why The Backrooms actually exists, its meaning and cultural import, has become a subject of intense debate in our house. My nine-year-old son first told me about it. He remains utterly convinced it’s a real place. On the weekend, when he’s allowed a bit of internet trawling time, he offers up regular rolling news reports that some Australian game vlogger or Nigerian cryptogarch has posted satellite photos confirming its precise geolocation. I’m sceptical but fascinated — torn between debunking my son’s rolling stream of fake news or burrowing deeper into our the shared rabbit hole. When it comes to internet culture, the line between misinformation and myth is as fuzzy as it was for the ancient Greeks.

Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash

What began as a minor curiosity, became a full blown maze fixation after I recently read Suzanna Clarke’s ingenious, prize-winning fantasy puzzle-novel, Piranesi. The book is every bit as transfixing and unnerving as idea of The Backrooms, and similarly difficult describe. When I read the jacket copy I was like, huh?

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

There’s no way to describe Piranesi without making people’s eyes glaze over. I’ve tried and failed on many occasions to convey how great it is. It’s one of those books you just have to read. You know how people often say a good book “lingers on in the mind”? Well Piranesi inverts this effect. It’s as if you linger on in the mind of it. After I’d finished the novel, I experienced the distinct sensation that a part of me remained inside its pages, trapped the puzzle maze of Clarke’s imagination.

The reading experience is doubly disorientating since the entire book is also about a labyrinth — both a literal and figurative one — so reading it is like opening a series of Russian dolls: Subject inside form inside subject inside form on and on, ad infinitum. The maze Clarke constructs is one that exists both materially (within the confines of the book) and also within the individual and collective consciousness’ of the characters’ themselves and finally, of course, in the connected mind of the author and reader. Like all labyrinths, however, Piranesi’s is ultimately born of madness. I won’t spoil the plot — because there absolutely is a plot, a rip-roaring one in fact — except to say that at its centre is a nightmare.

Like The Backrooms, the Piranesi is properly frightening, not in a jump-scare “boo!” hackneyed thriller sort of way but on a deeper, almost sensory level, like an ASMR video or a Kubrick film… actually one Kubrick film in particular.

If you want to venture deeper into the mysterious online maze of mazes, this BBC Culture piece on the history and meaning of labyrinth in English literature offers an excellent digest. In it, the critic Cameron Laux observes of Clarke’s work that “there is a sense that [her] labyrinths aren’t meant to be solved, but rather dissolve. Going to her looking for direction may be a waste of time, because even she might not understand them. Not understanding might be essential.”

Needless to say, the same true of The Backrooms. The confusion it induces is what makes it so compelling. It’s less an urban legend than a half-formed notion or a scrap of a rumour that, by accident or intention, evokes an ominously pleasurable subconscious stirring. Like a fleeting dream, it seems to operate on an internal logic of its own. It’s not that you can’t understand it, it’s that you’re not sure if you even want to, because if you did it might simply cease to exist.

According Wired and Vice, The Backrooms traces its roots to an anonymous 4Chan post in May of 2019, on the /x/ discussion board in which users had been asked to post “disquieting images that feel ‘off.’” Here it is:

My elder son, in case you’re wondering, is not on 4Chan. He does, however, have a disturbingly fine-tuned radar for anything transgressive that slips through the porn/hate/gore filter of his sanitised pre-tween-corner of the Internet.

The Backrooms began as a “creepypasta” — online slang for an ekphrastic genre of user-generated paranormal and scary stories which often evolve from a single image or phrase then proliferate in the collective imagination, distributed largely via internet forums. But the Backrooms mythos has evolved to the point that you could argue it has all the makings of modern religion — complete with fractious and competing schools of thought, sub-branches, complex morphological maps, countless fan-fiction interpretations and a plethora of terrifying “found-footage” video montages in the style of The Blair Witch Project, many of which command hits well into the millions.

Similarly, the secret horror at the centre of Piranesi involves a kind of cult, although a far more academic one that operates within the confines of the English academic establishment. Still, the parallels are uncanny.

The Pool Rooms (below) is a viral found-footage video homage to The Backrooms that has millions of hits and has since spawned burgeoning sub-genre of watery imitators. The poster, who goes by the handle Jared Pike, is an Instagrammer whose sizeable following and social media presence is exclusively dedicated to the ominous abandoned pool maze theme. Now I could be wrong, but I’d be willing to bet Pike is not a devoted Suzanna Clarke fan. Yet his eery oeuvre feels like a direct reference to Piranesi’s labyrinth.

If you want to get shivers thinking about the collective unconscious, watch the video, then re-read the jacket copy above.

When YouTube imitates art? (Or something.)

Like Jared Pike and the legion of Backroomers who congregate in the borderlands the light and dark web, spinning ever-deeper into their empty netherworlds, Suzanna Clarke herself is a bit of a literary enigma.

In a career spanning over twenty years, Piranesi is only her second novel and third book in total (her first novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was published to acclaim in 2004 and a lauded story collection followed). In interviews she’s described her many false starts, and more recently, her despair at the illness (chronic fatigue syndrome) that’s intermittently plagued her health. Piranesi has, consequently, been widely interpreted as a kind of metaphor for the uncanny isolation induced by chronic illness, in particular those of the mysterious, misunderstood “malingering” 19th Century variety like chronic fatigue, depression and environmental illness.

But the novel could just as easily be read as a loose metaphor for the dysphoria of the internet, the figurative and literal maze in which we wander and learn, awestruck, searching, suffering, loving and longing, forever leaving little bits of ourself behind in an endless trail of cookies. The vast and glittering labyrinth we collectively constructed then somehow allowed to consume us. The hall of mirrors, the puzzle-trap, the back rooms behind the back rooms — the netherworld we can never leave.

On other bright side, if you’ve read this far your attention span can’t be completely shot!