Negative Space

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Negative Space is bleak and well-written. It contains devastating moments and is, objectively, a good book. That said, I couldn't help but loathe the protagonists, so there's that. Negative space in art, also referred to as "air space", is the space around and between objects. Instead of focusing on drawing the actual object, for a negative space drawing, the focus is on what's between the objects. For example, if one is drawing a plant, they would draw the space in-between the leaves, not the actual leaves. This technique requires one to forget about a conceptual meaning of an object and forces them to observe through shapes, rather than drawing what they may think an object looks like. Negative Space is more than worth your time; you may not be worth *its* time. It's something worth chewing on. I apologize for my vague praise, but it's all my pea-brain can offer. 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.”

This nightmarish zone made accessible by WHORL remains ominously ambiguous throughout Negative Space, and its influence on the town is left spookily undefined: is it the cause of the decades-long suicide epidemic in Kinsfield? Is someone using these indeterminate entities as a means of exacting revenge? Or, is this realm a hellish form of purgatory, a spectral catchment full of wandering souls once belonging to the suicidal townsfolk? While the story obliquely gestures to each of these interpretations in kind, with particular attention being paid to whether Tyler is the conjurer or conduit of these unspeakable forces, the real strength of the novel is its refusal to settle on any one answer, instead harnessing vagueness and obscurity as a fertile source of dread and terror. Authors, if you are a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can edit information about your own books. Find out how in this guide.

An instant classic of nightmarish potency. Haunting, harrowing, devoid of all light, but gripping to the fullest. The east coast equivalent to Grace Krilanovich's underrated The Orange Eats Creeps. And I loooooved the LGBT representation. LGBT characters exist, and aren't defined by their queerness. It's not even brought up. They're just allowed to exist, and it's wonderful. Although it’s not practical to give a design education in a blog post, if you know something about negative space I bet you’ll look at books and the way they are designed very differently. And these are all lessons you can use if you decide to design your own book. So here goes: 5 Ways Negative Space Affects Book Design

It’s a hard book to read – due to the subject matter and the stylistic and structural choices, it’s hard to understand and often even harder to sympathize with the actions of some characters. Yet you don’t want the novel to end, like a fever dream that feels more Real than real. Wish I could give this one more than 5 stars. Not just my favorite thing I've read this year, but probably one of my favorite things I've read ever? As soon as I finished it I wanted to reset my progress and start all over?? I never feel that way.

I'm not hopeless (or a "doomer" as one in my generation might say). I don't think B.R. Yeager is either, nor do I think that was the message intended to be gleamed from this book. I believe a better future is possible, but aside from theory and praxis, I truly do not know the answers to the anxieties that plague us, and that is what makes "Negative Space" scarier than any creature feature or "nobleman discovering dark secret" type story. It reflects the reality of a future that, while not devoid of the possibility of change, seems relentlessly despairing, and it does not shy away from portraying this in all its ugliness and uncertainty. I don't know what the future holds. Nor do Jill, Lu, Tyler, Ahmir, my friends, anyone. I do know, however, that this book is terrifying, not only for its surface level horrors, but also because of how it shines a reflective mirror I don't want to look at - a mirror of me, my friends, my family, our future, and the future of this world and where humankind is going.

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.’ 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.” 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 don't think I've ever read anything that SO accurately expressed my inner mental state all the time? This book feels like it was pulled straight from my own brain. Entropy is an intentional choice of words because it feels like entropy is the core and foundation of the entire novel. The disintegration of everything into a slow fire, time’s inevitable charge, how everything and everyone you ever knew will one day be forgotten and there will be nothing left to mourn; it’s bleak no doubt, but it’s through these people Yeager creates immense empathy for these characters and hints that entropy might not necessarily be negative and possibly even a transcendental process (as we see at the end of Lu’s arc and, to a lesser extent, Jill’s)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 is a whole different beast. While I eventually was able to appreciate what Amydalatropolis did, by reframing 4chan posts as literary art, and revealing the absolute barbarism which lies at the "heart of darkness" which is the free, wild web, and that Yeager is perhaps the first novelist to ever UNDERSTAND the Internet and express this in a text worth reading--I adore Negative Space, because it does something wildly different exploration of a wildly different phenomena. Chen, Mark; Shannon, Chelsea (2020). Photography: A 21st Century Practice. Oxon: Routledge. p.188. ISBN 978-1-000-18524-9. You might wonder how you can design with something that, in a sense, doesn’t exist. If you design it, is it still blank? Yeager devilishly subverts what at first feels like a formulaic, pulpy, teen-horror story, and even at the early stage of its narrative it is engaging.

Leach recalls that in 2014, when a text arrived to say her husband was cheating, she had been writing a review of a book about Irish art and architecture. And she carried on: “My body was so full of adrenaline that, instead of screaming or fighting, I went still, and I went to work, with words.”