Negative Space

Product Information

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. Immediate and wholly convincing…She is uncommonly good at writing about being embodied… Negative Space is the record of a writer remaking life and language, knowing they will always be strangely matched.’

I adored Negative Space. It is a personal Ways Of Seeing for twenty-first-century women … Leach beautifully articulates what it is to be a writer, what it is to be heartbroken, what it is to be betrayed and ultimately what it is to be human.’ Rubin's vase is an optical illusion in which the negative space around the vase forms the silhouettes of two faces in profile, a well-known example of figure-ground reversal by emphasizing that negative space. FedEx‘s logo displays an arrow between letters E and x. Not being in full silhouette, the effect is subtle and may not be noticed. Michel Onfray in negative space, with the surname shaped by the letters of the given name, and reciprocally.

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Horrifying in a compulsively readable way, Negative Space charts the erratic and disturbing movements of a group of teens living in a small New Hampshire town. For these kids life in this town is a stultifying existence, as evidenced by the copious amount of drugs they consume. They take a lot of drugs, and I mean a lot of drugs. Popping pills first thing in the morning, smoking weed all day long, winding down in the evening with some shrooms or acid…and then there is WHORL. It will claw its gravitational grasp, pull you into a dark fever dream, and it won't let go. It will crawl into your thoughts and wrap them in bleeding hallucinations. It's been over a week since I finished reading this book, and I can still hear it whispering like a night wind that blows free through my skull.

This is for the generation that is not afraid of an empty hotel up in some Colorado mountains because they could never afford to stay in a hotel like that. This is a novel for people trying to make sense of the world through witch TikTok, reading up anarchist theory, and trying not to forget to wear a mask, all while watching their future being gang-raped by rich people and mass shot by incels daily. 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." 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.So much of the book underlines the fact that people are made up of all we consume, feel, and think. Friends and relationships come and go, we fragment ourselves and pass out the pieces to those we get close to; there’s a constant exchange of wet chunks from each other, both physically and spiritually. Time and circumstance can separate, but the indentations on our psyches and marks on our bodies are often permanent. 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. For a writer whose subjects are primarily visual, she pays a lot of attention to sound, detailing the tinnitus (“an internal bell, an inner alarm”) that means she is never quite unaware of her own insides. While training as a perinatal yoga instructor, she learns to channel and appreciate the sounds she had made giving birth to her children. Negative Space – the title invokes drawing lessons from her mother – is partly about allowing her writing to become more personal: or better, more physical. Criticism and autobiography start to merge, and Leach finds correlatives for her predicament, or instruction on how to get beyond it, in a wide array of art and literature.

Negative Space offers moments of intense beauty and clarity of expression that subvert expectation.’ Totally DublinGod 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