Negative Space

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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. I see this book mentioned often on this sub and there’s a lot of praise for it so I put it on my reading list because people often cited it as being a mashup of junji Ito and Lovecraft. After reading it all I could feel was... nothing?

Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath fold wrinkles into your face, carving minutes, irreversible wounds between your joints. A rich experimental writing style weaving together age old Satanic-panic fears and their modern day manifestation. In art and design, negative space is the empty space around and between the subject(s) of an image. [1] Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image.

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Negative Space is more than worth your time; you may not be worth *its* time. It's something worth chewing on. I apologize for my vague praise, but it's all my pea-brain can offer. When you’re learning how to add values to create form, the idea of intentionally leaving areas blank and untouched may seem troublesome. But I’ve learned that with great art, not everything has to follow a set rule or be rendered entirely realistically in a drawing. 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).

B.R Yeager’s Negative Space was released on this unsuspecting planet on March 1st 2020 by a little known Philadelphia based publisher called Apocalypse Party. Thirteen days before everything went to shit. It has become the talk of the town since, but I believe this conceptual horror novel is not done colonizing our collective consciousness. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in 2021 and toxoplasmosis for the soul. I mean that in the most complimentary way.

Someday I’ll wake up and it’ll be like my life’s already over, because it’ll be dozens of years from now already and I’m still the same. Sets of mirrors facing each other, expanding space and me and every moment I’ve been here. Nobody knows me, because I haven’t left anything for them, and I can’t stand to look half of them in the eye.” A series of three prints, a large white letter R, N, and F are accompanied by a graphic of a little girl, dog, and bus respectively, each illustration creating the defining shape of each letterform. The taglines state: 'You either see the letter or the dog (bus, little girl). Don’t text and drive.' Negative Space is a whole different beast. While I eventually was able to appreciate what Amydalatropolis did, by reframing 4chan posts as literary art, and revealing the absolute barbarism which lies at the "heart of darkness" which is the free, wild web, and that Yeager is perhaps the first novelist to ever UNDERSTAND the Internet and express this in a text worth reading--I adore Negative Space, because it does something wildly different exploration of a wildly different phenomena.