I'm a wife, mother, Christian, closet Luddite, Neanderthal advocate, incurable book hound.
I'm also the author of The Scattering Trilogy, which is set in 10,000 B.C. Buy, read, pass it on!
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I did this painting from a picture that my father took in December 2025. We have frequent high winds here in Idaho. In this picture, the wind has knocked power poles down along this rural road, stretching into the distance. You can see that the wires are still connecting the poles together. In addition, the wind has taken the metal “wheel lines” (used for irrigation) and blown them in among the power poles. The white line snaking across the field in the middle distance is a wheel line that has been pushed out of shape. Finally, you can see tumbleweeds caught among all the works of man on the road there. The white van belongs to the power company. It has its doors open, and its boom is protruding off to the right. Idaho Power is always very good about immediately starting to fix disasters like this. They will even send people out while the storm is still going on to try and restore power.
I used to only want to paint nature landscapes, but the longer I live in Idaho farm country, the more interested I get in including things like power poles and grain silos in my paintings. They have a certain sci-fi splendor. When I first saw this photograph, I knew I wanted to paint it because of the repeating lines of the fallen power poles. I thought it would be relatively simple: paint the fields, then add the lines bisecting them.
The longer I painted, the more of the mess I was able to see. I literally did not notice the hardware still on the fallen power poles until I started painting it. It won’t surprise you to learn that I have greatly simplified this scene. There were additional broken-off pieces of power poles, and additional bits of wheel line, that I’ve had to leave out.
The following thoughts were inspired by being read the 14th chapter of Matthew. It contains the episode where Jesus walks on water, then calls Peter to come to Him, and then Peter briefly walks on water as well.
This episode is so well-known that nearly everyone has heard of it, even if they have never read Matthew. There are paintings of it, songs about it, and so forth. It is so iconic that we tend to think of walking on water as one of Jesus’ characteristic moves. It’s as if He came to earth with a checklist, and on that list, a few items above “die and rise again,” was “walk on water.”
However, that is not the way it comes off if you read the entire chapter. Jesus has spent most of Matthew ch. 14 reacting to things.
First, He hears that His cousin and friend John was just executed by Herod, for the most arbitrary reason. He tries to “withdraw by boat to a solitary place,” presumably to do some praying and grieving over John. But when He gets there, a large crowd has followed Him. So He adjusts His plans and spends some time healing their sick. Then, it transpires that they are out in the middle of nowhere and there are families who haven’t brought anything to eat, so Jesus multiplies the loaves and fish in a very low-key way, again apparently in response to the need of the crowd.
Then, finally, He sends the disciples away in the boat and He goes and has a private prayer-and-grieving time until about 2 a.m. And then, his friends are out on the boat in the middle of the lake, and He needs to get to them. So for whatever reason, He decides to walk out to them on the water. Again, it seems more like a problem-solving move than a planned demonstration of His power.
When being read this chapter recently, for the very first time it occurred to me to wonder, “Why did He take it into His head to do that?” I mean, what a funny thing to do. Walk on water.
We don’t usually see Jesus using His divine powers just for fun. I mean, in theory, He could have flown if He’d wanted to. But we never see Him flying. We never see Him do any number of miracles that He could have done just to amuse Himself.
That’s what tickles me about His decision to walk on water. It comes off as unnecessary, creative, even playful. Jesus knew how to respond to changing circumstances and go with the flow.
Now, to be clear, Jesus was also capable of planning. I have mentioned before that, as the prototype human, I believe He perfectly embodied all the personality types. So while capable of responding creatively to contingencies, He also knew how to stay on-mission and work the plan. There are many examples of this. He knew that He would eventually be killed in Jerusalem, but we see Him saying “my time has not yet come” to go public. He says at one point, “I was sent to the lost sheep of Israel,” meaning that His primary teaching was for the Jews, though He was fully aware that the changes He would work in the world would soon encompass the Gentiles too.
Closer to our theme, some of Jesus’ miracles do seem to be done intentionally to make a point, either about who He is, or what His Father actually meant by the Law. He would sometimes intentionally heal people on the Sabbath, even in a synagogue, in order to open the discussion about what Sabbath regulations were actually legit. He delayed going to visit Lazarus until Lazarus had died, because He knew the time had come to a do a big, public resurrection right near Jerusalem. That was a case of “Look, everybody, I’m about to do a miracle.” But at the same time, He couldn’t be baited into “giving a sign” by people who were never going to accept any sign.
But others of His miracles–and these are my favorites–are a response to people and circumstances. He turned water into wine at Cana (again, in a really low-key way) because … well, because they had run out of wine. He healed the Canaanite woman’s demon-possessed daughter because she charmed Him with the way she asked. And I think this walking-on-water thing is in the same category. He needed to get to the boat, so He walked to the boat. Peter said, “If it’s really you, tell me to come to you on the water” … so Jesus told him to come. It was only later that this incident became super iconic and super spiritually symbolic and all that. At the time, it was just Jesus making a decision that this was the quickest and easiest way to get back to His friends. And I love Him for it.
Somewhere about the year A.D. 178 Celsus wrote one of the bitterest attacks upon Christianity that was ever written. It was precisely this appeal of Christianity to the common people that he ridiculed. He declared that the Christian point of view was, ‘Let no cultured person draw near, none wise, none sensible; for all that kind of thing we count evil; but if any man is ignorant, if any is wanting in sense and culture, if any is a fool let him come boldly.’
It was precisely this that was the glory of Christianity. In the [Roman] Empire there were sixty million slaves. In the eyes of the law a slave was a ‘living tool,’ a thing and not a person at all. A master could fling out an old slave as he could fling out an old spade or hoe. He could amuse himself by torturing his slaves; he could even kill them. For them there was no such thing as marriage; even their children belonged to the master, as the lambs of the fold belonged not to the sheep but to the shepherd. Christianity made people who were things into real men and women, more into sons and daughters of God; it gave those who had no respect, their self-respect; it gave those who had no life, life eternal; it told men that, even if they did not matter to other men, they still mattered intensely to God. It told men who, in the eyes of the world were worthless, that, in the eyes of God they were worth the death of His only Son. Christianity was, and still is, the most uplifting thing in the whole universe.
–from The Letters to the Corinthians, a commentary by William Barclay, pp. 21 – 22
I’m posting this review in the spooky month of October, a long time after the movie came out. People who are big Backrooms fans have already seen the movie, watched or listened to reviews, and written or uploaded their own reviews. This essay is not for them. It’s for readers of my blog, who, unless I miss my guess, are not familiar with Backrooms lore and perhaps have not seen the movie.
Teens, and Liminal Spaces
The Backrooms was an independent horror movie made by a young director, but the director did not originate the idea of the backrooms (which I will now stop capitalizing). I happen to know a little bit about where the backrooms originally arose as a mythology. The reason is that I am a mother of teenagers.
Well before the movie came out, my teens had acquainted me with backrooms images and lore. Apparently, the phenomenon began with Internet accounts such as Creepypasta posting images of liminal spaces.
Liminal spaces, which always figure big in mythology, are “in between” spaces. They may be the beach (neither sea nor land), the threshold of a doorway, the wilderness between the borders of kingdoms, or the like. There are also liminal times–dawn and dusk. Humans have long had the uneasy feeling that liminal spaces and times are where we are vulnerable to encountering entities that we do not meet in everyday life. It’s when you go over the moors in the mist that you meet the fairies.
The Internet liminal spaces were generally of two kinds. One, indoor spaces that are actually liminal, such as hallways and stairwells. They are part of a building, but only marginally. They are not the areas where people live or work, but rather passages to get to those areas. Often, their very design makes them disorienting, like a hotel hallway with low light and an endless succession of identical doors. Typically, these spaces do not have windows whereby the viewer might be able to tell the time of day or where the building is located.
The second kind of Internet liminal space is an indoor space, usually for public use, that has been abandoned. This includes empty malls, empty hospitals, empty parking garages, and the like.
After a number of these images had been posted, the young people of the Internet collectively decided that they constituted a realm or dimension of their own, dubbed “the backrooms.” Commenters began to make up their own lore about the backrooms. You could “no-clip” into them by accidentally falling into the backrooms dimension. (No-clipping is something that happens in a video game when your avatar falls out of the useable area of the game.) People began to make up stories about teams that would go into the backrooms with a backpack of snacks and try to film and map them. The backrooms developed different “levels,” each more unsettling than the last. One level was nothing but an endless succession of hotel pools.
The deeper a person went into the backrooms, the more dangerous they became. The realm became less and less picky about adhering to the laws of physics. Also, although ostensibly empty, explorers would begin to glimpse movements and shadows out of the corners of their eyes. Eventually, the lore developed elusive monsters that inhabit the backrooms.
Given all this, you can imagine that my sons, particularly my youngest, were pretty excited when they heard a Backrooms movie was coming out. There was enough lore by this time to having the makings of a paranormal mystery/thriller.
Not Everyone Can See The Backrooms
One day, my youngest and I were in nearby Big City with enough time and money on our hands that we could see a movie. I was a little bit interested in Disclosure Day, but I was flexible to watch something else too. We drove through the movie theater parking lot and glanced at the posters. There were three or four posters for current movies, including Disclosure Day, and one poster frame that was just filled with brown paper. So, Disclosure Day it was! We parked, and approached the theater.
Whereupon we found that the “brown paper” was actually a poster for The Backrooms. It was patterned like the dingy yellow wallpaper that features in many of the backrooms hallways. It did have the title and so forth, but everything was in such low contrast and we hadn’t been able to see it from afar.
Naturally, we changed our plans and watched The Backrooms instead.
Quick Spoilery Summary
The plot of the movie was not at all what my son expected based on the lore, nor was it what the first five or so minutes of the movie lead you to expect. However, it has been praised as being well-crafted and character-driven, and not without reason.
After an intro in which we see people in hazmat suits exploring the backrooms and coming to grief, we meet the man who is going to be the main character, Clark. You can see him in the image at the top of this post, wearing on his face the look that all people wear when they first get into the backrooms.
In an important early scene, Clark is sitting in the small office of his therapist, Mary. As you can see from the image above, Mary’s office–and in fact all the “real life” scenes in the movie–are decorated in a sort of late 70s/early 80s style that is heavy on fabrics and abstract patterns. People’s clothing is the same way, so that even the “normal” scenes in the movie are slightly suffocating.
Mary, who is a self-help guru, walks Clark through the last argument he had with his wife, right before his wife kicked him out of the house. They role-play, and soon Clark is fully re-living the fight, yelling at “his wife” that she is lazy, that he is working his butt off for her, and so forth.
Right in the middle of this, Mary says quietly, “What are you feeling right now?”
Clark, confused, says, “Are you being yourself — or –?”
“I’m asking you. What are you feeling?”
Clark is unable to give an answer — at least, an honest answer, because what he is feeling is selfish rage. Mary, for her part, though she has just uncovered an ugly, sinful attitude from Clark toward his wife, does not have any other tool in her toolbox than “You’ve got to feel your feelings.” She is not equipped, for example, to call him to repent or point him to Christ.
Clark, since his wife kicked him out (“of my house!”), is living in his place of work, which is a furniture warehouse. He sleeps on the showroom bed and watches the showroom TV. His whole life is in a liminal space.
To advertise his furniture, Clark has his two twentysomething employees film him in the character of a pirate with a peg leg. He hobbles around the furniture showroom, trips over something, and cusses them out as they film him.
The electricity in the furniture showroom keeps glitching. This necessitates Clark going down to the lower level of the furniture store, which is even more backrooms-like, to the fuse box. Eventually, on the blank wall next to the fuse box which should lead to nothing, he sees the lighted outline of a door. He steps through this “door” and finds himself in a large, featureless, yellow room with fluorescent lighting and a large pile of furniture that resembles his furniture in the middle of the floor, with some of it merging into the floor. He has found the backrooms.
The next time Clark goes back to Mary’s office, he tries to tell her about these rooms he has found. He shows her the map he has started drawing. He’s very excited, and somewhat incoherent, and Mary assumes he has been drinking again.
Clark then bribes his two part-time employees to go into the scary realm with him, bringing an old hand-held video camera. Things don’t go well, and he returns without them.
Weeks later, Mary notices that Clark has disappeared. She drives over to the furniture warehouse, where she finds mail piled up at the front door. She lets herself in. There is the furniture, there is a cardboard cutout of Pirate Clark, but the lights are low and the place seems abandoned. She wanders down into the basement and discovers the door to the backrooms.
In the backrooms, she finds a large, disturbing graffito on the wall that shows a pirate monster eating people. She wanders on, gets herself into a dead end, and hears the approach of something large. Just when she is starting to panic, Clark appears. He says that he will save her. Instead, he chokes her until she passes out.
Mary wakes up in a small, dark backrooms facsimile of a kitchen, tied to a chair. Clark is sitting across the table from her. Also in the room are three other entities. They are human-looking figures similar to mannequins, but with their faces distorted as if from a blurred photograph. One of them is a facsimile of Clark’s wife.
Clark is eager to tell Mary all that he has discovered about the backrooms. His theory is that the realm produces imperfect copies of things that exist in real life, both places and people. He says he prefers the mannequins to real people, and demonstrates that he can stab one with a kitchen knife and there are no bad consequences. He says he likes the backrooms better than the outside world, feels that he belongs here, and intends to stay.
“That’s fine,” says Mary, “but could you please let me out?”
She asks what he wants. He says he wants to hear her say that he was right.
“Oh, you were so right, Clark, about this realm existing. I was so wrong! I didn’t believe you.”
“No, not like this,” says Clark. “I want to do the role-play.”
Clark takes the wig off wife-mannequin’s head and puts it on Mary. Now he wants to re-enact the fight scene, with Mary saying what he wishes his wife had said.
Mary tries, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Eventually, she starts telling Clark what she really thinks.
“You know why your wife left you? It wasn’t the drinking. It wasn’t the fighting. It was the whining! It was the self-pity!”
“I don’t want to change,” says Clark.
“Then don’t!” says Mary. At this point, she has given up on helping Clark through therapy and has admitted, despite her best-selling book and seminars, “I can’t help anybody.”
“I want to stay here.”
“Then stay! Just let me go home … please?”
Clark unties one of Mary’s wrists. Then a sound is heard approaching that causes the mannequins to startle in fear. The wife-mannequin runs to an acute corner of the kitchen and seems to be trying to climb out.
In through the narrow door squeezes a monster. It’s an 8-foot version of Pirate Clark, with a real peg leg and a distorted face with big teeth.
Clark greets the pirate. “This is my therapist,” he says. “She says we don’t have to change!” The pirate picks up Clark and takes a big, gory bite of his neck.
While the pirate is killing Clark, Mary has untied her other wrist. She squeezes past the horror, through the very narrow passage, and out into the rest of the backrooms. Soon, the pirate is following her, dragging the body of Clark behind him.
Mary runs and runs, totally lost. At one point, she thinks she has escaped into Clark’s furniture showroom, but it’s just the backrooms version. The pirate catches her and is about to maul her, but Mary spots on the floor an item that represents what might be her only happy childhood memory. It’s a chunk of cement into which she and her mother once pressed their handprints. Mary picks up the memory and bludgeons the pirate’s face with it until he is temporarily incapacitated.
My Son’s Worldview Analysis of the Movie
The drive home from Big City was forty-five minutes, and it was not enough time for my son and me to settle all of our questions about The Backrooms. For example, we agreed in a general way that Clark’s mind and the backrooms got into a sort of feedback loop where it manifested his thoughts and desires. But there were hints of Pirate Clark earlier in the sequence of events, before Clark moved into the backrooms. What is the relationship between Captain Clark and the other monsters of backrooms lore? The jury is still out. I couldn’t quite follow some of the metaphysical distinctions my son was making.
What we did agree on was this. The role the backrooms play in Clark’s life are a picture of the progression of sin. At first, he’s scared to go in. He’s very cautious. Then, he tries to bring some other people into it (the employees), which results in their destruction. But eventually, he realizes the backrooms offer him a way to live however he wants, be in control of things, and escape consequences. When he finally admits to someone else that he doesn’t want to repent, and they give him “permission” not to, that’s when the sin shows up in full strength and eats him. After that, there is no Clark left, only his big, ugly sin.
My son came to these insights so quickly that I was really proud of him. It appears that several years of training in theology, literature, and worldview analysis from his classical Christian school have not been wasted.
The Lingering Effects of The Backrooms
The end of the movie is ambiguous about whether Mary ever gets out. She is “rescued’ by a team of people in hazmat suits. This is the team from the original lore. A man interviews her in a room that looks like a police interrogation room. It becomes obvious in a few minutes of conversation that he doesn’t know much about the backrooms either, and in fact he’s rather incoherent when he tries to explain to Mary what his organization even wants. The implication in the interview is that the “rescuers” are never going to let Mary go back to the real world, because she has seen too much. It’s also not clear whether their facility is located inside of, or outside of, the backrooms. It’s like when we “wake up” from a dream only to find ourselves in a second dream about waking up.
Though my son was somewhat disappointed by The Backrooms, he says that in the weeks since we’ve seen it, it has been growing on him. It was actually kind of a powerful story, and “it generates a lot of good memes.”
Would You Go?
Now that I have spoiled the major parts, would you see this movie? I did leave out a lot of important, tense, and horrifying details, so you could still get good and scared if you wanted to.
Under the category of “encroaching chaos,” I have now noticed aliens starting to appear in advertisements.
The strange thing is that the ad copy never makes an explicit connection or offers an explanation for why the alien is there. At least, not as far as I can tell. These are, of course, ads of the “intrusive unwanted video” type, so I am not finishing watching them.
I’ve seen two.
Women (played by a real actress) says: “I used to XYZ. Then everything changed.”
Then, up behind her pops an AI alien with disturbingly sexy biceps. He leers at the camera for a second.
Then, the scene changes and it’s someone talking about the product. The alien is never mentioned.
Second one:
We get a line about the presenting problem that the product is supposed to solve. This is illustrated by an AI alien (female this time — I think) waking up with a gasp in bed, wearing a nightgown.
Then, the scene changes and it’s a normal actor talking about the product. Again no explanation of the alien is given.
So I just have one question.
What the hell is going on here?
There is no conceivable way that sticking a random AI alien into an ad would make the viewer more likely to buy the product. The alien is not in there as a joke or as part of a clever bit of writing. It bears no relation to the product, and in fact strikes a jarring note.
There is not even any way the presence of a random alien would make the viewer want to finish the ad. It is so visually and narratively repellant that it makes the viewer regret they could not skip the ad sooner, before their eyeballs were assaulted in this way.
And keep in mind, this is coming from a person who’s not averse to watching fiction or documentaries about aliens. As long as it’s well-made. As long as it MAKES SOME KIND OF SENSE.
It’s not the alien itself I object to. It’s the intentional irrelevance of the alien. Plus, of course, the leering.
I really do suspect a deep dark conspiracy here. This is an intentional assault on the mind of the public. The purpose is to normalize … something. Least bad case scenario, these ads are seeking to normalize the sight of aliens being subbed in for humans in otherwise normal ads; appearing in human situations; and (I shudder to write it) leering at humans.
Even worse case scenario, the ads are seeking to normalize things not making sense. When something makes this little sense, and goes by so quickly, the mind’s tendency is to skip over it, forget it, and certainly not make a big fuss or push back.
Or, on the third level of hell, these ads are not merely trying to normalize things “not” making sense, but instead, they represent a species of aggressive, expansionist nonsense. They are out to level the cities in the viewer’s brain, a little bit more with every viewing of what can only be called anti-sense.
It’s similar to the scene in That Hideous Strength, where Mark’s sometime mentor, now jailor, Frost, puts Mark in “The Objectivity Room.” This room is a brainwashing tool that is supposed to remove all “bias” from Mark and allow him to see the world “objectively.”
The room is an example of subtle, but aggressive, nonsense. The Gothic point over the door is not quite centered. The corners of the room are not quite square. The dots on the ceiling almost make a pattern — but they don’t. The paintings on the walls are absurdist. The room is anti-comfort, anti-human, anti-stuff-created-by-God.
To complete the training, Frost shows up every day and asks Mark to do a random task that is obviously arbitrary.
When Mark finally resists him, Frost can’t think of anything to say. It’s not that he cannot choose what to say from several possible alternatives; he cannot think of any words. He has given his mind to the Nonsense for so long that it is now taken over by … nothing. And that’s scary.
What do you guys think? Have you noticed these alien ads? Do you have any tips for dealing with them?
Gray After Dark is a horror story about a jogger in the Frank Church Wilderness who is kidnapped by insane, Christian-y preppers. (#notallpreppers #notevenmostpreppers #actuallyprobablyjustoneortwo #notanyChristians #butstill)
The preppers are a father, Fred, (certifiable abuser) and grown son, Hamish, (brainwashed and cowed) who take advantage of female hikers to “tame” them and make them their “wives.” They don’t just prep like normal people, gardening, learning basic gun safety, having a backup generator, keeping chickens, etc. Instead, the live completely off the grid, in a shack way out in the middle of nowhere, and like the Ingalls family, they live on game and cornbread. They think they will be glad of all this when the SHTF.
But weirdly, Fred isn’t even that capable as a prepper. He will shoot a moose or deer and then just leave it. No real hunter would do that. He doesn’t bother to bathe himself, or allow the other members of his household to fulfill basic hygiene. For example, they have to sneak around behind his back in order to wash their hands before handling food supplies. Again, any capable off-gridder would know how important cleanliness is to avoid getting sick. And, of course, Fred also damages and endangers his own project by treating the two women in his household in a way that most capable hunters wouldn’t even treat their dogs. This is just part of his overall M.O. of shooting himself in the foot (metaphorically) by not having any control over his large collection of besetting sins. “He who loves his wife, loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28) is a Bible verse that Fred has apparently never come across.
The family has a shed on their property where they keep their food supplies: gobs of “white plastic gallon buckets.” (I assume Ihli means 5-gallon buckets or bigger, because gallon buckets are awfully small for storing bulk food supplies, but anyway.) In some of these buckets is flour. In others there are wheat berries. Where did these supplies come from? They must have been bought at some point, because Fred and Hamish clearly aren’t farmers. But that is never explained. Plastic food-storage buckets are designed to keep pests out, yet somehow, the flour has become infested with weevils. This is just one of a number of examples where the descriptions of the preppers’ lifestyle makes me scratch my head. To be fair, I have never survived off grid, so I don’t know enough about it to say that all this could not happen. (And bugs somehow made their way into plastic flour-storage bins when I lived in Indonesia.) But, I do get the vibe that Ihli is in the same boat as me when it comes to survival knowledge. Her conception of these particular preppers is that they live in ignorance and squalor.
As mentioned, Fred also does not appear to be a capable Christian cult leader (if that is what the book is going for). There are, indeed, horrific Christianity-adjacent cults where women are kept prisoner with a variety of brainwashing tactics, but these cults tend to use actual ceremonies, harangues, and Bible passages (though twisted). Fred is never shown reading anything (although he’s not stupid). “Mary,” the other woman in the household, reads the Bible to the new prisoner, but we are never told what passages. Again, the level of research seems to be “they’re violent and crazy, and also there’s a Bible.”
Besides being a horror/thriller, Gray After Dark is also a little bit of a love story. The chapters swing back and forth between the perspective of Miley and her ordeal with the preppers, and her dear friend, Olympics training partner, and not-quite-yet boyfriend, Brent. That’s right, in the manner of a romance novel. Brent is tracking Miley through the Frank Church Wilderness, which he compares to “looking for a lost watch in New York City.” He is really devoted to her, and his sweet strength provides a refreshing counterpoint to Fred and Hamish’s harsh weakness. The proportion is about two or three chapters of Miley to one of Brent.
And, though I’ve been somewhat hard on this book for its portrayal of the “Christian” preppers, it works really well as a thriller/love story. It isn’t really about Christian-adjacent prepping cults. Fred and Hamish are there to provide the horror and the threat. I’m willing to accept that people like this exist, albeit in small numbers (at least in the West), just as I’m willing to accept that large numbers of people become very animalistic in an EMP apocalypse or a zombie apocalypse, for the sake of the story. And that’s what Gray After Dark is … more of an “imagine this situation” type of story than an “all of society is like this” story of the kind we might expect from Margaret Atwood. It’s a page turner, and despite some minor hiccups I enjoyed it.
What do you think? Do you like thrillers? Love stories? Apocalyptic? Wilderness survival? Have you ever gotten bugs in your flour?
