Negative Space

by B.R. Yeager

paperback, 382 pages

Published Feb. 29, 2020 by Apocalypse Party.

ISBN:: 978-1-7335694-5-3

(12 reviews)

"Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black Rainbow, absorbing the energy of mind control, reincarnation, parallel universes, altered states, school shootings, obsession, suicidal ideation, and so much else, B.R. Yeager’s multi-valent voicing of drugged up, occult youth reveals fresh tunnels into the gray space between the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, providing a well-aimed shot in the arm for the world of conceptual contemporary horror." —Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million

“Ever wonder where teenage children go at night? Perhaps it’s best not knowing the answer. There’s something amiss in Kinsfield, a drab, boring city much like your own, except for the teenage suicide epidemic, stagnant, ineffectual parents, cultish behavior that borders on psychosis, and strings, strings everywhere. B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space is a hypnotic collage of message boards, memes, and ruined bodies twisting at the end of a rope. Most modern novels have lost all concept of magic. B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space is a stunning refutation of the quotidian.” —James Nulick, author of Haunted Girlfriend & Valencia

1 edition

Lucas reviewed Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

It's not just hopeless, but against hope. The world is already over.

3 stars

Content warning Mild spoilers for events later in the book and themes overall

The point-of-view characters seek the very few people around them that should, according to common social or familial understanding—girl/boyfriend, parent, school, church, high-tech care home, etc.—be present, helpful, understanding, caring, but are not (are instead, themselves, closing up in hatred, roiling in despair). The teens, even knowing they've been discarded, have no future, are driven nonetheless by these expectations and desires into hateful, doomed relationships. The most fortunate ones are abandoned; the rest are used and abused, scraped out from the inside for as long as they can bear putting off suicide, hitting snooze with minor distractions (drugs, sex, work).

I felt it sagged in the middle, where many hallucinatory passages felt samey, sludgy. Then the end rushes not to resolution, but to obliteration. Definitely a mood.

[Further thoughts contain mild spoilers, I suppose.]

I also thought it interesting that the experiences under the influence of WHORL were not straight-forward, that they were, once you got past the creepiness of the black tendrils, mostly affirming of emotional and social connection—not only snaking in/out of orifices through which humans relate through smells, kisses, sex, but also bringing to life the emotional connections one has with the living and the dead (your dead pets, relatives, exes), whether that leaves you reassured or frightened. I mean, it even smashes your phone for you—real human connections only! (Jill never seems to learn this and is always being left on read.)

If anything, Lu—and to a lesser extent, the crosses-on-eyes My Boyfriend's Back fella—learn to find some sort of balance between self/other through "occult" ritual; that it's often Onanistic is meaningful, I think. Whether/what that says about Lu and her, presumably, place on the spectrum, I'm not in a good position to say. Notably, almost all the characters' "normal" social relations—parents, school, church, hospitals, retail etc.—are toxic, demanding, shuttered, discarding responsibility for providing for their psychological and emotional well-being. It's only through WHORL that the real relationships—good and certainly bad—seem to be enabled, encouraged. And, given the world they're in, they really need to grieve and rage at God.

Alecs Ștefănescu reviewed Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

Couldn't put it down

5 stars

I read the last couple of hundred pages in the company of dear people. I could have stopped reading and resumed by cozy social evening, but I could not bare to not know how this book ends. What happens all the way to the point where the author decided that enough has happened.

This was an extremely good read. For me, what stood out most was the depth of emotion, turmoil, the nuanced decisions of each character. There was no point where one of them felt "secondary". Some stories contain characters who feel like they are meant to provide context for "the main characters" to develop. This book did nothing of the sort.

I felt waves of powerful, consuming emotions, while reading this. I've had nightmares and vivid dreams every night while I was reading it and I fully expect that fragments will populate my subconscious and bubble to the …

There are frequent descriptions, in the book, of moments when one character is within the body of another. I often felt I was inhabiting the fictional body of these people who didn't exist, but who were vivid and vibrant in my mind. Maybe those parts of the book described empathy, projected desire, or allowed one character to interact with another in a way that wasn't possible in the physical world.

Gender and sexuality, in the book, were depicted in such a realistic way that I finally felt someone "got it". These aspects of the characters were never addressed explicitly, but they existed solely in the social interactions between them and - most probably - in how they were perceived by readers.

I loved that the author was never prescriptive about what a reader was meant to feel. I loved the ambiguity, the foreshadowing, the hints.

Joerg reviewed Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

Review of 'Negative Space' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

At some point a teacher says Maybe try being less pretentious. I think it was the collective scream of the characters of this mess trying hard to be edgy and ominous.

Cari Fisher reviewed Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

Review of 'Negative Space' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I don't know quite how to convey this book. A totally weird, totally disturbing read. I enjoyed it a lot, tho the last hour or so dragged a bit. There's no real 'resolution' either, but I'm not mad about it because it's the nature of the whole weird tale. Bizarre like a long acid trip! WHORL*

jeri reviewed Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

drawn out pointless violence

2 stars

I rushed through it because it was reading like a lot of words with little development and little interest of making sense to the reader.

It's not that it's badly written, it's readable, but the violence and plentiness of it feel ultimately pointless.

Erin reviewed Negative Space by B.R. Yeager

Review of 'Negative Space' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

This was very readable, but I was not enjoying the story events. It was kind of chaotic and had a lot of repetitive types of scenes. I’d have preferred more drawn out moments that really established character personalities and relationships. It has more of a vignette feel because of the POV shifts, which was not working for me.