It started with a poem.
In Monsters in the Closet, my queer horror poetry collection, there’s a piece called “The Thing in the Mirror.” It was one of those poems that came quickly but lingered long. At the time, I thought it was a one-off—just a tight little reflection on shame, identity, and the horror of seeing something in yourself that you don’t quite understand. But something about it stuck with me.
That poem whispered. Then it began to echo.
What if the thing in the mirror wasn’t you?
What if it wanted to be?
And just like that, a short poem became the seed for a full-length novel: Backscatter.
Creating Characters Worth Destroying
When I sat down to write the novel, I knew the mirror wasn’t the heart of the story—the people looking into it were. Horror only lands when the stakes are real, and for me, that always starts with the characters. I didn’t want to write stock gay archetypes. I wanted to write a couple. Flawed, funny, loving. Tender. Relatable.
I tried a few tropes—bad boy meets sweetheart, age gap, artist and muse—but nothing really landed until I hit on one of my favorites: Sunshine and Grump.
James is the grump—sarcastic, emotionally armoured, still quietly carrying grief he never fully unpacked. Ethan is the sunshine—warm, playful, someone who wears his joy a little too loudly, maybe because he knows how fragile it really is. Together, they feel lived-in. The kind of couple who finish each other’s sentences while arguing over throw pillows.
And that’s exactly why it hurts when things start to go wrong.
Haunting from the Inside Out
In Backscatter, the horror doesn’t kick down the door. It seeps in. James brings home a vintage mirror—a mid-century sunburst he finds at a strange estate sale—and everything shifts. First subtly. Then not. Ethan starts changing. Their intimacy curdles into something obsessive. The mirror doesn’t just reflect—it watches. It remembers. It replaces.
What makes this horror story different is that it’s deeply personal. The mirror isn’t just haunted—it’s intimate. It knows where the cracks are, and it works quietly to widen them.
To me, that’s the scariest kind of horror:
Not something that attacks from the outside—but something that erodes from within.
A Queer Love Letter to Cosmic Horror
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to cosmic horror. Not the tentacles. Not the monsters. But that feeling—that existential ache. The idea that the universe is bigger, older, and colder than we can comprehend… and that maybe we were never meant to survive it.
There’s a lot to critique in Lovecraft’s legacy, and rightly so. His racism, xenophobia, and yes, the name of his cat, all cast a long shadow. But one thing I’ve always admired is how his work made the universe feel terrifyingly indifferent. That’s powerful horror. And I wanted to write a queer response to it.
Because queerness, like cosmic horror, resists easy definitions. It thrives in the in-between. It challenges structure. And it refuses to disappear quietly.
Backscatter is, in many ways, my homage to that kind of horror—but queered, emotional, and intimate. It’s about the terror of being seen too clearly. About what happens when identity, memory, and love itself are no longer stable truths.
The Mirror as Metaphor
Mirrors are inherently queer objects. They reflect, distort, reverse. We’re taught to fear them, study them, question them. For queer people, that’s familiar territory. How many of us spent years looking into mirrors, wondering who we were and what others saw?
In Backscatter, the mirror isn’t a passive object. It’s an entity. A slow, lurking presence. It doesn’t scream—it whispers. It invites. And eventually, it reaches back.
It doesn’t want to scare you.
It wants to be you.
Writing Horror That Loves Before It Hurts
I didn’t want Backscatter to be all doom. I wanted it to love first. I wanted to show a queer relationship that’s soft and playful and complicated and real. Because if readers don’t care about James and Ethan, the horror won’t matter.
So I let them fall into routine. I let them argue over what qualifies as “vintage.” I let them laugh and drink wine and fall asleep on the couch together.
Then I let the mirror into their lives.
Because when horror threatens something beautiful, that’s when it hurts.
And that’s what I love about queer horror—it’s not just about survival. It’s about the cost of love in a world that’s not made to hold it. It’s about the risks we take to be known. And what happens when something unknowable answers back.
In the End, It’s Still a Love Story
Yes, Backscatter is about haunted mirrors and cosmic dread and losing yourself to something ancient. But it’s also about love. The kind that endures even as the stars collapse. The kind that fights, even when it knows it might lose.
The horror doesn’t cancel out the intimacy. It amplifies it.
That’s the heart of queer horror, to me:
It lets us be soft and scared. Tender and doomed. It lets us be seen, even when what’s looking back might not be human.
So yes, it started with a poem.
But it ended with a story about two men, a mirror, and the terrifying beauty of being reflected back.
-Ryder
Discover more from Ryder Tombs
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
