The Backrooms Book

Overview

The Backrooms Book is a collaborative horror anthology told through the fragmented accounts of several individuals who have become trapped in the Backrooms — an infinite, liminal complex of empty rooms, humming fluorescent lights, and deteriorating geometry. Each narrator entered through a different moment of disorientation, a misstep, a fall, a no-clip into the wrong place, and none of them fully understand where they are or how to get out.

Rather than following a single protagonist, the story weaves together five distinct voices: a practical survivalist writing diary entries, a self-important aristocrat treating her imprisonment as a personal insult, a good-natured wanderer doing his best to stay upbeat, a desperate soul reduced to fragmented poetry, and a lost user communicating through a barely-functional chat client. Together, their accounts map the psychological and physical toll of the Backrooms across multiple levels — from the iconic yellow wallpaper of Level 0 to the sensory void of the Dark Level to a flooded ruin with something lurking in the water.

Characters

The anthology features five narrators, each defined by their voice and their particular way of processing entrapment.

• Sal — The most grounded of the narrators, writing in a numbered diary format. Methodical and dry-humored, Sal documents survival basics with pragmatic detachment — scratching the wallpaper to track paths, rationing almond water, arming himself with a boiler room hammer. His entries grow increasingly tense as he realizes he is being followed.
• Evangeline Ross Parker III — A self-declared royal who interprets the Backrooms as a personal affront to her lineage. Verbose and imperious, she refuses to acknowledge danger, chalking unsettling presences up to paranoia and insisting that harm to royalty is contractually impossible. Her obliviousness functions as dark comedy.
• Gordon Fisher — A cheerful, sociable wanderer separated from his friends after accidentally no-clipping to Level 1 alone. Gordon copes through bad jokes, rambling observations, and conversation with a silent companion named Henry, whose nature is left ambiguous. His warmth makes the loneliness underneath it more visible.
• The Unnamed Poet — An anonymous voice reduced to fragmented verse, cycling through questions of entrance, exit, and belonging. Their entries appear across multiple levels and function as the anthology's emotional undercurrent, giving shape to the dread the other narrators paper over.
• Simmons — A teenager or young adult who stumbled in while connected to an online chat client, communicating in casual shorthand with a user named Reeves who doesn't realize something is wrong. Their section is told entirely through chat logs, the disconnect between the mundane medium and the situation generating its own quiet horror.

Locations

The anthology spans several distinct Backrooms levels, each with its own environment and psychological effect on those who pass through it. Level 0 — the starting point for most narrators — is characterized by endlessly repeating yellow wallpaper, stained carpet, buzzing fluorescent lights, and an absence of doors or exits. It is disorienting primarily through its sameness. Level 1 introduces supply crates and a more warehouse-like structure, giving Gordon a degree of material comfort even as the social isolation deepens. Level 5, encountered through a boiler room passage, is oppressively hot and filled with pipes. The Dark Level is a sensory void — no light, no sound, not even the sound of one's own heartbeat — that Gordon moves through largely by trying to maintain his sense of humor. In the latest chapter, Level 7 appears to be submerged or partially flooded, dominated by ocean imagery and the presence of something unseen in the water.