Negative Space (2020)

by B.R. Yeager

Teenagers, narcotics, self-harm, occult sciences: Negative Space. A swirling narrative bouncing between three characters and myriad altered mental states, with the plot in the backseat and themes and emotions driving.

B.R. Yeager is an indie author unafraid to color outside the lines. “Aesthetic comfort is creative death for me. So I seek out art that feels alien, that provides a shock to the system” [1]. This 2020 novel published by Apocalypse Party fits that bill. The opening chapters kick off a neat story arc about drug abuse, copycat suicides, and a small town’s morbid fixation on this spectacle. This arc is never resolved — instead, the novel’s latter half brings a plunge into the abyss. The story is transmuted into an arcane horror about eyes staring back from the void and the psychogenic substances and rituals that form the bridge between our world and this other side.

The writing is in some ways sophomoric and the content is at times heavy-handed. As the subject matter becomes more esoteric, semi-coherent dream passages start featuring prominently. The prose is perhaps intentionally inelegant as it is delivered in the first person by ignorant high schoolers who cut class to get high (you might need to google a few things if you didn’t hang out with the druggies). It’s a fast read that propels you forward with suspense and it keeps the tempo up with short perspective sections.

Disturbing, muddled, queer, arcane, Negative Space is these things and more. It’s fucked-up nightmare fuel and it is a shock to the system. Yeager took aim and hit his mark; I don’t hold it against him that this mark was something other than what I bargained for.

[1] On Negative Space, adolescence and black metal: a conversation with B.R Yeager (Dead End Follies)