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A review by screamdogreads
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
"All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I'd ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you'll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn't miss me. Vultures swam above in muggy beige and blue light and everyone around me felt as hollow as balloons. I took out my phone and started taking pictures, too. It was beautiful because we didn't know him."
Review updated as of my re-read (24.3.24-26.3.24) wow. Didn't know it was possible to love this book any more than I already did.
Scarce are moments like these, when a novel is so enjoyable that simply articulating the experience becomes a mammoth of a task. I think it's an entirely fair thing to say that, books like this, are my entire reason for reading. Negative Space is one of the most disgustingly haunting novels to exist, upon entering the world penned here by Yeager, both the boring and ordinary are cast aside, welcomed instead is the literary equivalent of a black hole. Like inhaling smoke off a car crash, Negative Space is a blissfully spiritual event, a ceaseless, endless thing, more than just a book, it is brilliant yet grotesque.
Negative Space acknowledges so beautifully the decaying and dystopic void that is teenage years. An enrapturing, mesmerizing story that delicately clutches the fragments of lost youth, this novel, like all the best novels are, is highly self-indulgent. It's an obsessive, gaping maw of razor sharp fangs that exist to eviscerate mediocrity and convention. This is, perhaps, the bleakest, most horrifically devastating novel I've ever had the pleasure of reading. It's much like being hit by a speeding bus and then watching as your roadkill remains are fucked by God. Negative Space will douse your brain in gasoline and cast upon it a lit match. It will rot you from the inside out, and delight in doing so.
It is the most pretty and pristine depiction of nihilist blues. It's a story to claw its way into your body, and never, ever let you go. It's a tale which will worm its way into your thoughts and smother them with its corrosion. Negative Space will pollute the soul with its sickening hallucinations. Eons ahead of its time, this is the kind of novel to sit atop the throne of Hell. Books such as this adorn the bookshelves of Satan. The future of horror awaits us, and we're all in for a bloody great time.
Review updated as of my re-read (24.3.24-26.3.24) wow. Didn't know it was possible to love this book any more than I already did.
Scarce are moments like these, when a novel is so enjoyable that simply articulating the experience becomes a mammoth of a task. I think it's an entirely fair thing to say that, books like this, are my entire reason for reading. Negative Space is one of the most disgustingly haunting novels to exist, upon entering the world penned here by Yeager, both the boring and ordinary are cast aside, welcomed instead is the literary equivalent of a black hole. Like inhaling smoke off a car crash, Negative Space is a blissfully spiritual event, a ceaseless, endless thing, more than just a book, it is brilliant yet grotesque.
Negative Space acknowledges so beautifully the decaying and dystopic void that is teenage years. An enrapturing, mesmerizing story that delicately clutches the fragments of lost youth, this novel, like all the best novels are, is highly self-indulgent. It's an obsessive, gaping maw of razor sharp fangs that exist to eviscerate mediocrity and convention. This is, perhaps, the bleakest, most horrifically devastating novel I've ever had the pleasure of reading. It's much like being hit by a speeding bus and then watching as your roadkill remains are fucked by God. Negative Space will douse your brain in gasoline and cast upon it a lit match. It will rot you from the inside out, and delight in doing so.
It is the most pretty and pristine depiction of nihilist blues. It's a story to claw its way into your body, and never, ever let you go. It's a tale which will worm its way into your thoughts and smother them with its corrosion. Negative Space will pollute the soul with its sickening hallucinations. Eons ahead of its time, this is the kind of novel to sit atop the throne of Hell. Books such as this adorn the bookshelves of Satan. The future of horror awaits us, and we're all in for a bloody great time.
"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 folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it'll only be worse in the future. "
Yeager has truly crafted something special here. Like the most unsettling of fever-dreams, Negative Space begs to be dissected. Its ocean deep misery is sourceless, never to be named, the narrative eschews from even analyzing the mass suicides. Something is happening, something that lays beyond the comprehension of the characters and far, far outside the grasp of readers. It's a book shaped pit of despair and melancholy.
And that's why this book is so terrifying. It's not the violence, it's not the hallucinatory magic of the storytelling or the simmering occultism and gruesome disfigurations of the body. It's because this nameless thing, this cosmic nightmare that appears only in subtleties, lays bare the facts - death shall be senseless and vulgar. Yeager understands so completely, so fully, the moroseness that hangs over the future. He emphasizes so fantastically with the desolation of an entire generation. What makes this book truly scary is how beautifully the futility of living is translated.
"When I close my eyes, even for just a second, sometimes I see a picture in my mind. His body frozen, stretched across asphalt, face down and away from me. Face down and away from everything. His body dragged naked and pale along the river's floor, scraped up and nipped ragged by trout. Or his silhouette, dangling from an ancient tree."