Negative Space

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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? As for the characters: they’re teenagers. I was an asshole as a teen, so were all my friends. It’s just an intense and volatile period where everyone is narcissistic and testing boundaries and still developing empathy. The people who think these characters are abnormally rotten either don’t remember what it’s like to be a teen, or know WAY nicer people. B.R:This might sound like a bullshit answer, but as a creator I don’t see my work as particularly extreme, especially compared to people like Blake Butler, or Gary Shipley, or Grace Krilanovich. Or especially someone like Kenji Siratori. Those people are operating at a level far beyond me—it seems like more of a mystical practice, text as peyote button, whereas I’m still in the physical plane, concerned with telling my little stories. Like, I get that my stuff might feel more extreme than plot-driven, 3 act genre fiction, but that’s only because I’m pulling from the real wild stuff. But ultimately, it’s still operating within familiar narrative traditions. When you get down to it, Negative Spaceisn’t that divorced from a Stephen King novel. But with something like 300 000 000, it’s hard to trace where that’s emerging from. It feels completely cut off from tradition. This book is intelligent, because it is subtle; esoteric, because it is subtle; and queer, because it is excessive beyond identity.

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? Baumhauer’s investigationson the nature of the soul bely a fixation with the inorganic in its archaic sense: incorporeal or spiritual substances. At the dawn of natural philosophy, the inorganic did not signify non-living substances or materials, but the stuff of the afterlife. The inorganic as we know it today simply did not exist. In Negative Space, the archaic definition, the contemporary definition, a few possible, ephemeral third definitions of inorganic are at issue. Rather than an exploration of some trite ‘darkness inside the mind/soul/psyche’ or a cosmic horror from the infinite Outside, the horror of Negative Space is the indeterminacy of the inorganic.

I myself definitely don’t earn a living from writing alone (though the supplemental income is a big help). And freelancing doesn’t really appeal to me, so I’ve gone the day job route. 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. Your most recent novel, Negative Space, rotates through three different perspectives. And Pearl Death, your piece from Inside the Castle, is a story written through object lore in a set of a hundred cards, much different from the way we traditionally experience and read fiction. With all three of these, did you plan the structure first? Also was Tyler’s father a ghost? Ahmir read his journals and he made a comment that seemed Sixth Sense-ish, something like they can’t see me.

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? 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. Tyler is a Virgil-like, shamanic figure that guides us deeper and deeper into the WHORL-abusing, self-hanging, 4chan-posting underworld of Kinsfiled, Massachusets. “Everyone knew Tyler was going to die young,” Ahmir says at some point, and this pervasive sense of doom, of inevitable heartbreaking end infects the entire novel and every character that comes into touch with Tyler. Yet none of them shy away from this doom, just like they don’t shy away from the overwhelming feelings of love and dread that feel them, or their sexuality and fragmented personalities and identities. They are not likable people, but that doesn’t invalidate their stories.I’m really curious to know why other people like this book. I feel like I’m either missing out on critical information or maybe this genre isn’t for me. I do feel like a part of me is too used to horror movies, where there is usually a clear goal or objective, whether that’s surviving or escaping something for example. Overall I didn’t hate the book but I guess I just wanted something more to bite into. I wish I could give this an even higher rating than 5/5, something that transcends the confines of this rating system to match the theme of this unbelievable novel. I never did try salvia, although if I’d discovered it earlier I probably would have. At any rate, in the novel WHORL is a drug that opens a portal to another realm of existence. This portal can facilitate access to supernatural powers. It’s unclear whether it is the user’s intention or simply their innate nature that determines whether the power will be used for good or evil, but regardless we see examples of both play out in the book. Yeager takes his time in fully explicating the significance of WHORL and the particulars of its use (and abuse), which is good because this uncertainty in the reader’s mind is what fuels the narrative engine. At first, B. R. Yeager’s Negative Spaceassumes nothing more than the garb of your typical, formulaic horror novel. 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.

We go exploring with three main characters – Ahmir, Jill and Lu (who is sometimes Lou, sometimes a he or a she – and nothing about is explained, and neither it should be explained). They barrage the reader with their reality at the intensity of a cover bombing. The trio goes to the same school and is bound with the fourth character – Tyler. Jill and Tyler Ahmir and Tyler are friends, Jill dates Tyler, despite her parents’ displeasure, and Lu is forced to know Tyler because her other two friends know him. Firstly, it really feels like nothing happens for the entirety of the book. All the kids do for the entire length of the novel is take drugs, be shitty to each other, take part in rituals and occasionally abuse animals. Then they die. There is no overarching plot and there is no build up to anything. I really found it hard to care about anyone because all of the main characters (except Tyler to an extent) was really boring.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 Negative Space does not offer a chirpy, smiling simplification of the essence of complexity. It is not merely a story with ambiguous characters influenced by polyvalent, indeterminate forces. It exceeds. Furthermore, during many of Lu’s narrations we read a forum along with her. The usernames of each participant appear in bold headings, just like Lu, Ahmir, and Jill’s names. At some points, clues lead the reader to believe that they know the identity behind a particular username, but anonymity reigns online. This particular forum is where pictures of recent suicides in Kinsfield are uploaded. So, we have an indefinite number of people gathered together in a ‘space’ that doesn’t physically exist but nonetheless exists. In this space they gather to wait for images to upload, to talk to one another, and to discuss what may be behind the spate of hangings. What results is further fragmentation of the storyline, offering us more paths to follow or holes to fall down as we try to understand what is going in Kinsfield and who any of the people involved really are.