I'll jump to the quick on this one.
I enjoyed some aspects of The Backrooms by Morgan Solis, but there was a lot that I didn't like about it.
I want this article to focus on this novel, and it's surprisingly difficult not to go down the rabbit hole of the history of the concept of "The Backrooms" as well as popular and influential interpretations of what the backrooms are since their inception as the barest of ideas from 2019. But that's kind of the brilliance, that a single image can invoke an entire pseudo-folklore about something that was just the day before, nonexistent. There's a pretty good distilled history of the backrooms on CreepyPasta that you're welcome to read rather than have me regurgitate it back here.
The first thing I didn't like about the book was not that it was written in the present tense, but the writing itself. I'm obviously not claiming to be a literary critic or someone who could actually sit down and write something that wouldn't be panned for being poorly written. To me, I felt that the writing just wasn't good. Maybe it does have something to do with the present tense as it does take a while to get used to, but I've read several books in present tense, American Psycho, The Hate U Give, One Flew Over the Cuckcoo's Nest, and sections of Jane Eyre so it's not an entirely foreign concept for me. I feel like the text comes across as amateurish, as if I'm not an amateur myself.
"Monday rolls around and the weather resembles a scene straight out of a dark film. Gray skies and swirly dark clouds roll into town, creating the perfect setting for a cozy ambiance." (pg 11)
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"The friends start compiling paperwork and resume editing, cracking jokes throughout the night about work and co-workers, exes, and their favorite TV shows.
Nancy tries on various potential work outfits and the apartment soon becomes a cheesy montage scene from a romantic comedy, minus the romance." (pg 12)
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"They meet at the park that is located near Nancy's upcoming interview, she brings Leroy along." (pg 16)
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"She notices that there are no windows in the entire lobby, yet the room is spacious enough to help one not feel confined. The room also appears to be remarkably well-lit for having no windows or natural lighting." (pg 22)
"She shoots Nina another text venting a bit, it lags sending, but eventually sends." (pg 47)
Something I realized while pulling these lines of text was that most of my critique about the writing is from the first third of the book, mostly before Nancy makes her way to the office building for her interview, and only the last two quotes are from when she is starting to become lost and disoriented when her interviewer doesn't show up. While Nancy's story about getting lost in the backrooms differs from the formula of no-clipping through walls, I actually prefer Moran Solis' approach here because I find the concept of "no-clipping" to be too video gamey for it to be believable in a psychological-horror story taking place in the real world. If it's handled as a matter of perspective, as in Labyrinth, compared to a literal wall that you can walk through, like in the Harry Potter series, then I'll be happy. Nancy being walked through a confusing series of turns through seemingly identical hallways and getting turned around is what I would imagine the transition to the backrooms to actually be like.
That being said, I was disappointed when, after waiting longer than she felt comfortable in an interview room, when no interviewer showed up, she effortlessly found her way back to the lobby where she started.
Nancy follows Fera down a long hall with office rooms on both sides, each marked with numbers but no names or titles...
She leads Nancy down a long stuffy hallway, appearing to be much more dated than the sleek lobby. Every door is identical, which Nancy notices is peculiar.
Fera takes Nancy down the hall, then to the left, then another left, then right, then another left. Soon, Nancy loses track of how many turns they have taken. She wonders how all those other office spaces could be busy at the moment...
After walking for several more minutes and taking countless left and right turns, Fera comes to a slow and unsure stop. (pg 34)
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Finally, she gathers up her belongings and heads back toward the lobby, she trips while leaving the room, stubbing her toe rather violently.
Cursing under her breath and slightly flustered, she limps back to the lobby.
She walks for about a minute, then pauses. "Am I, lost?"
She then hears the music coming from the lobby, she speeds up her pace.
Fera's name tag is no longer on the front desk... (pg 35)
I realize that this is still early on in the story, and having Nancy lost in the backrooms after only 35 pages wouldn't leave a lot of room for the story to develop in the real world. However, events like the one above happen several more times in the story. Nancy leaves the lobby to look for the interview room, finds it, then finds her way back to the lobby, and even eventually back downstairs to the front entrance, but the entrance is locked, and as she later finds out, people outside cannot see her inside the building. Granted, finding yourself locked inside a large building as people walk by unbeknownst to your predicament would be terrifying, but it doesn't always come across that way through Morgan's writing.
Another thing that bothered me was the battery life on Nancy's phone. We're told early on in Chapter 6 (page 43), after returning to the interview room, and sometime after noon, that Nancy is confused upon finding out that "...her battery is already depleted" when she opens her flip phone to play some games. My reading of that line was that her battery level was probably around 100% when she left for her interview, and now, several hours later, is below 25%, maybe less. I know from personal experience with a flip phone that if you had your WiFi on, but in a location where you couldn't get either a WiFi or phone signal, your battery would drain faster as the phone was actively looking for a WiFi signal. I don't know if that was supposed to be the case here. In Chapter 8, we're told that Nancy "...realizes the battery is shockingly low." For me, this would be at or below 10% battery life. In Chapter 9, "...her phone is near the end of its battery life..." Less than 5%, maybe even as low as 2%? Four pages later, Nancy closes her phone after checking the battery life so that she can "preserve energy." Six chapters, 39 pages, and over 12 hours later, "Its battery is nearly dead, she turns its volume and brightness down to preserve energy." At this point, I just couldn't with Nancy's phone anymore. Maybe the battery level isn't really as low as Nancy thinks it is, but there didn't seem to be any indication that this was a hallucination; otherwise, the battery level might've been fluctuating and not just decreasing.
Luckily for my sanity, in Chapter 16, Nancy comes across a drawer full of phones seemingly from different eras, including ones that sound like smartphones with a touch display, which seem like they hadn't been invented yet. This revelation I really liked as it places Morgan's backrooms outside of normal time and space. That maybe Nancy is from 2003 and is questioning a phone from 2023 in a drawer along with phones from 1993 and 1973. But because of dehydration, not having eaten for hours, fatigue, stress, and blood loss, Nancy's mental state begins fracturing as she cycles between being scared, angry, upset, frightened, annoyed, and complacent. Her frequently changing states of being don't come across as poor writing, but more as someone who is unable to adequately cope with their situation. And during a lot of these scenes, Nancy was not always lost in what we think of as the backrooms, those monotonous yellow walls and damp brown carpets with blinking overhead fluorescent lighting.
It feels kind of wrong to say that I thought that Morgan's writing fit better when Nancy wasn't doing well. When Nancy begins questioning her own reality about why she was even in the building in the first place, and how the music from the lobby of the 14th floor metamorphoses from being just, "...an old dreamy song that Nancy guessed is from the 1940s era" (pg 32) to "...the only sound she hears...is a familiar tune, not quite familiar enough to sing along, but familiar enough to wonder" (pg174).
I was satisfied with the end of the story as it felt appropriate. The image of a woman having gone through the ordeal that Nancy went through, wondering if she should call to reschedule her interview as she walks down a hallway, fits well with the concept and execution of the backrooms. Sure, if she had escaped and reported her events to any kind of authority, her sanity would be questioned, but it's not like the building and the business weren't already confirmed by her friend Nina, who walked with her when they scoped out the building at the beginning of the book. And honestly, I would probably read a sequel about Nina becoming lost in the backrooms as she searches for her lost friend*.
*This made me think of the first Resident Evil movie. I was pretty disappointed with a lot of the decisions that Paul W.S. Anderson made, especially coming off the brilliant Event Horizon. Then Resident Evil ends with Alice draped in lab coat, armed with a shotgun taken from an abandoned cop car as the camera pulls back revealing an empty city in the midst of a massive zombie outbreak, and then there's a pair of bloody hand smears outside of a window 5+ stories up, and I want to know more about that particular incident. What happened to that person that they thought climbing up and out of their window was the best option? What did they think was going to happen? What happened to them? And with that one shot, I knew that I wanted to see whatever the sequel was going to be. With The Backrooms by Morgan Solis, Nina is those bloody handprints on the side of the building.
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