Negative Space

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It seems like Jill died out in the woods, Ahmir healed from some of his trauma, and Lu died on or around their 91st birthday. The inorganic is particularly stirring because in all of its definitions it is not wholly other. It belongs to this world, and even if it is extraterrestrial, it obeys some kind of natural or physical law. The chemical mechanics and physical dynamics that make up our day-to-day lives are the very same processes that lead to our perishing. Today, this is hardly frightening or uncomfortable truth. We have immune responses for this very thing. Abrahamic religion might do it for some; Zen might do it for others; stills others may find shelter from the infinite in psychedelics, art, Stoicism, or what have you. We have ever more artifices to shield us from the twin, terrifying prospects that being may definitively end or may indefinitely continue. Ben:You've been mentioning teens a lot as a thematic obsession, which ties in to the parallels you make between your writing and Stephen King's. He's pretty obsessed with teens too. What is it about that period in life that interests you? Ben:See, I doubted myself because she seems like the first one who's breaking from reality. For entire chapters, she's just reciting screen and text colors. Ahmir felt to me like the more grounded one even if he's clearly in love with Tyler. Were the passages about gender and nonbinary sexuality planned from the start or did they happened organically?

Entropy is an intentional choice of words because it feels like entropy is the core and foundation of the entire novel. The disintegration of everything into a slow fire, time’s inevitable charge, how everything and everyone you ever knew will one day be forgotten and there will be nothing left to mourn; it’s bleak no doubt, but it’s through these people Yeager creates immense empathy for these characters and hints that entropy might not necessarily be negative and possibly even a transcendental process (as we see at the end of Lu’s arc and, to a lesser extent, Jill’s) A confusing aspect of the book for me - was Lu transgender or non-binary? Others frequently referred to Lu as “she” or “her” but when Lu actively participated in the ritual they masturbated with their penis. Let me first get to what I enjoyed about the book. I did enjoy the alternating point of views shown of 3 main characters in the first person perspective. I also liked how there is a fourth protagonist who we only read about strictly from the narrative of the other three people. I haven’t read many books but I thought this was really creative and it made this medium was enjoyable. Other then this, I really don’t know how I feel about the contents of the book itself. Along similar lines of writing and design intersecting, Run Off Sugar Crystal Lakeby Logan Berry is really terrific too—this kind of psychedelic reenvisioning of Friday the 13th. At first, B. R. Yeager’s Negative Spaceassumes nothing more than the garb of your typical, formulaic horror novel.

A big part of what helped was doing social work. I had done that for a while and was like, “Okay, this has a lot of great value to a lot of people.” It’s like that cliché thing of being around people that hold your beliefs who you respect and stuff. I guess I was a bit enclosed in my social circle before that. Then, I think I realized in terms of the sciences or in terms of rational thought, that I took for granted the idea of things being ‘settled.’ I realized things one assumes to be true for a long period of time aren’t definitively true. I am not defined by my body necessarily. I’m not defined by my physical space, which I’m only interpreting, that my body and my sense are interpreting the world. Those experiences are not the world. It’s merely an interpretation of it. While this tactic undoubtably enhances the realism of the book – which is semi-modernist in its splintered, stream-of-consciousness style of prose – it also reinforces the precarious status of the reader, in the sense that nothing is directly or neatly given to us. There are no clear answers in Yeager’s novel, only hints and clues encrypted within each of the character’s narrations which, on careful reading, give way to a less opaque picture of the world of Negative Space. And yet, just as we start to become familiarised with the characters and setting, the book’s horror almost immediately intensifies, thereby causing whatever comforting awareness we have of the narrative to warp and shatter. Realism, in this sense, is used only to lure us further into the seemingly ‘unreal’ depths of the unknown. God the scenes with Jill and her family and its breaking apart are damn hard to read. The awkward tension, the fissure between her and her father (who clearly cares for his daughter but also clearly does not see her as a whole person and using this as a means for control, whether consciously or not), the emotional numbness and downward spiral of Jill’s mom after his death and the way Jill cruelly comes to realize that even something as supposedly steadfast and unbreakable as “family” can wisp away and fall into entropy, it all just hits way close to the bone As Lovecraft himself explains, all weird stories are characterised by “some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” Thus, the terror of Lovecraft’s weird fiction is premised on an external, alien reality (or ‘The Outside’ as it is sometimes called) infiltrating or encroaching upon the known terrestrial-empirical world of humanity, therein causing unfathomable horrors and mind-shattering anomalies to occur within the time-space continuum. Indeed, the metaphysical implication that throbs consistently within all his stories, regardless of character or plot, is the inability of human consciousness to fully grasp the true and essentially monstrous nature of reality itself. To quote the much-cited passage which opens Lovecraft’s most famous short story The Call of Cthulhu It was different for each three. Amygdalatropolis, the structure emerged really naturally. With Negative Space I knew from the beginning that was going to be those three rotating narratives and they had to be first person. Then, with Pearl Death, that felt very free. I was working on that on the side and I didn’t have to worry too much about a lot of formal aspects because the form felt very intentional from the very beginning. There wasn’t really any room or any need to deviate from the structure as it was already apparent.

Negative Space tells the story of three teenagers living in the fictional town of Kinsfield, New Hampshire: Jill, Lu and Ahmir. Something is happening and it might very well be the end of the world: their classmates are killing themselves, animals hurl themselves at cars on the highway, acts of random violence go barely noticed, their common friend Tyler might be communicating with higher beings. All our three narrators want is to survive whatever’s coming for them. B.R Yeager’s Virus of Life This book transcends sexuality by presenting these teens as having seemingly no preference in who they love, are with, and are themselves (there is even a character who is often referred to as 'she' and 'he,' making it hard for the reader to know exactly who or what this person identifies as). To delve into the abyss of those suicides and their connection to weight of the soul experiment, Yeager performs vivisection of the way we communicate and build myth of ourselves at school, with friends, and online. He easily achieves it by setting up a standard horror YA novel, a Twin Peaks and Euphoria lovechild if you will, only to pump it full of drugs and then let it, and us, face the world as it is. He doesn’t let you blink until he’s done. In my mind, your first novel, Amygdalatropolis, is a cult classic. That’s how I feel people are responding to it. It’s cool to see how far it’s gone, because it’s such an indie book. It relays the experience of fringe and transgressive board culture. Over the last, I would say, decade, board culture has slowly made its way into mainstream language. 4chan is, to some degree, a household name. Amygdalatropolis plays with form and mental space relating to living on the net in a way I hadn’t really seen before in books. What was it about this specific project that inspired you to commit to it?Ben:I don't think Negative Spaceis exploiting his death as much as Bell Witch’s album Mirror Reaperis exploiting the band's drummer's death. It's very much an homage. It makes even more sense now. Tell me, I gotta know: did you read Blake Butler’s 300 000 000 before this and if so, how would you say it influenced this book? I can't be the first one to make this parallel? s hauntingly beautiful prose made every reading moment feel like it streamed away, ceaseless, like waves that keep on seeking the shore when the light of day is fading and a darkened sky gathers. Yeah, this is not just a book to read. It's an experience to be immersed in. A dark one, yet magical nonetheless.

B.R:So here’s the exception! I’m extremely interested in writing for games—it’s a medium I’ve always been fascinated by—even though working in the games industry often sounds like a nightmare. There’s also very little demand specifically for writers, or at least there’s much more supply than there is demand. But if a studio was interested in having me write barks or item descriptions for them, I’d be down. Ben:Did you intend to write a horror novel with this book? Do you think if yourself as a horror writer? Because from my point of view, it kind of stumbled upon the genre if that makes sense. I love how Yeager made it personal too by using ideas with great symbolic value. For example, the orange extension cord is used by many characters to hang themselves. This is one normal thing that almost every household owns in towns like these. Using such an item in such a distressing way is both a statement that a) this is what people do around these parts and b) The disconnect between kids and parents has been weaponized by reality, which leads me to my theory. This book is intelligent, because it is subtle; esoteric, because it is subtle; and queer, because it is excessive beyond identity.I would love to work with someone who only really cares about the numbers and the candid aspects of things and then I just want to write all the flavor text. That’s one of the dreams there. In general I don’t think I’ve like…ever read a horror novel that’s as burned into the fabric of my brain as this one tbh?? The unique writing vivifies every incident and I don’t think there was a single scene from my first reading that I forgot, but everything on reread STILL took me by surprise and many of it hit even harder than last time. Most of my memories even with books I love are in the abstract or in pivotal scenes but every scene here is stamped into my brain to a very rare extent only summoned by the most vivid writing and even when describing something inconsequential, the writing is memorable B.R:Repeating myself, rehashing old territory. This was something I ran into in the past year and a half, where I ended up doing a few short stories about teens encountering the supernatural. And I’m still proud of those stories, but it felt too much like I was covering the same terrain. It was a real signal that I needed to get out of my comfort zone and try something new.

Authors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide. B.R:I actually only read 300 000 000once I was already pretty far into the novel—I may have even been doing revisions at that point. But I definitely found it astonishing and resonant. It’s probably the most frightening work of fiction I’ve ever read. In terms of influence, it was likely just a push to do better. Yeager already liked my review, so I suppose that's a good sign. When I read his debut novel, Amydalatropolis, I was absolutely horrified. It was the first book to TRULY frighten me. I couldn't sleep, I devised various ways to get it out of my house (return it at B&N, donate it, throw it in the trash) but each method was much more effort than I was willing to expend, mostly because I was worried if someone FOUND the book and linked it to me, and started thinking I was some sort of deviant. This is another argument for another time, but one of those pesky stereotypes of readers is that they thoroughly enjoy and identify with the text their reading, and therefore the content of the book becomes associated with the reader's character. I can confirm that although I read and love transgressive literature, I'm about as a square as some maiden aunt in a Jane Austen novel.

Fact

This specific quote made me ache inside, "I dreamed about a supercomputer that could erase anything in existence. First I erased all the spiders. Then I erased all the people, including myself. I wasn't there anymore, but I could still think and remember, and I wept and wept, wanting to be all the way gone."