Negative Space by BR Yeager
or, a pitchblack reflection of what Noir: A Love Story could have been
BR Yeager’s Negative Space is one of the darker books you’re likely to stumble upon. It tells the story of four teenagers in a small New Hampshire town as they deal with the daily drudgery and sorrow of being a teenager in a small town.
Of course, that’s only part of it.
Negative Space follows Ahmir and Jill and Lu and their relationship with Tyler and each other, creating a web of connections that drive the whole novel. While much of the novel circles round Tyler, who works as a sort of fulcrum, he also never has his own POV and so we only hear from him through dialogue and through the perspectives of the others.
Ahmir is Tyler’s best friend and Jill is his girlfriend. They’re both in love with him.
And we’ve all known someone like Tyler. Charismatic and captivating, but also just an absolute disaster of a person. I wrote about my own Tyler a back in 2022.
The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
The novel swirls around him, much like our lives begin twisting around those friends who mean so much to us, who drag us deeper and darker. And in this way, it’s fitting that we never see the world through Tyler’s eyes.
If you’ve read Jacob’s Room or The Waves by Virginia Woolf, you may understand this kind of structure. There’s also The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño and my own novel (out today!) Noir: A Love Story, which uses this technique.
But things get worse in Negative Space and they keep getting worse. It’s not enough that we have teenagers being teenagers, doing drugs and getting drunk.
There’s a plague of suicides hitting the town, taking friends and peers alike, seemingly at random. Tyler begins taking a strange hallucinogenic drug called WHORL that he becomes a bodily need.
And then there’s Lu, who is quietly and secretly transitioning. She sees Jill as a sort of ideal of femininity but her parents are overly protective of her, overbearing, and locking her down from people like Jill, who spends time with the wrong kind of people.
Lu spends her time on a messageboard, tracking the plague of suicides as they happen. And one day, she is certain that she sees a picture uploaded of Tyler dangling, hanged.
Strangely, later, the post is gone and Tyler shows up at school like nothing’s happened and no one but Lu knows. But he’s changed in ways that are difficult to explain. He becomes almost a shaman of doom and destruction, desecration.
And slowly, all their lives begin to collapse inward on him.
A blackhole in all their lives, leading each of them to their own private tragedy. A relationship they cannot free themselves from, which swallows them.
And the book itself becomes like a blackhole, drawing you in, dragging you deeper. There’s a flowing, easygoing style to much of the narration. Conversationally, like an old friend is telling you about the strangest stories of their teenage years. The narration bounces back and forth between our three narrators often as well, sometimes every few paragraphs, and sometimes sticking with a single POV for pages at a time. Along with that, there are times when one of the narrators drops out of the narrative for a while only to switch places with one of the other three who takes a backseat for a while.
Despite this rolling conversation handed off between people, we’re never lost. Or, maybe a better way to say it is that when you get lost, it’s not because of the narrators, but because of the way reality begins to shudder and fracture.
There’s something apocalyptic about the novel. A texture or a scent in the air. Dread overwhelms the novel, even when things seem to be going well. There is always this bubbling threat of blackness, of an ending, of annihilation.
But by the time you get there, you’re stuck in it. The book clings to you like tar and you may not be able to put it down, to look away, even if you want to. Even if you need to.
In this novel of suicides and broken lives and blackhole romanticism, our protagonists do everything they can to escape but the darkness claws after them, forever hounding them as they wander the lightless labyrinth of life.
Pick up Negative Space by BR Yeager from Apocalypse Party.
It’s funny to read a book that reminds you of your own book that you wrote a decade ago, but I found myself remembering who I was both as a teenager and when I was writing Noir: A Love Story, which, like Negative Space, is an oral history of relationships and lives shattered by time, by love, by its absence. Both novels revolve around people whose perspective is never given, yet hang heavily over everything, shaping the lives of those who speak for them.
In some ways, Noir: A Love Story is the light to Negative Space’s pitchblack. But I find that resonance interesting between the two books, so caught up with the young, the fragile, the broken, and soaked with a kind of romanticism I’ve never really encountered anywhere but in Wong Kar Wai’s movies.
And today is the release day of Noir: A Love Story, so I hope you check it out.
You can read excerpts here:
If nothing else, pick up a book today and read it. You’ll feel better.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.
Some free books for your trouble: