Book Review: Negative Space

Tuko Wengi reads Negative Space. Did we all read the same book?? ⭐⭐

Four kids. A sleepy town in rural New Hampshire. A drug called WHORL. And a spree of suicides.

Negative Space is a book about the void of a bleak existence – the endless, limitless feeling of oppression under the guise of ‘life’, where we’re little more than cogs in the machine, only free in death. The author, B.R.Yeager, writes about four kids: Jill, Ahmir, Lu, and the protagonist supreme, Tyler, crafting a mindbending tale where reality buckles under the dread of something greater, something out there that pushes the people of sleepy, almost dead, Kinsfield, to commit suicide. And WHORL, the mysterious super-drug in town, is at the centre of it. Or more specifically, at the centre of Tyler’s relentless chase after the unkown void. Tyler communes with it, taking WHORL, talking to unfathomable entities, dancing with death from the very begin. He’s the one who sees most clearly. Or is he?

Jill is the naive lover, seeking affection from Tyler. Ahmir is the loyal ‘mistress’, jealous of Jill and spurred by his unrequited yet ‘requited’ love for Tyler. Lu is akin to a spirit in limbo, flitting in and out of the present and an unkown elsewhere, an environment where a mysterious being called ‘dot’ speaks to them. They all live in Kinsfield, a town of never ending horrors. Multiple hangings, gruesome and unexplained animal deaths, a school shooting and even random police violence, all culminating in the death of Tyler, which is less of a climax than a continuation of his descent into his madness.

To me, Negative Space reads disorienting. The disjointed narration, the jumps in time – Jared is dead, then he’s not – rendered me confused. I constantly found myself scowling at the screen, asking myself, “When are we?”. Lu’s narration is especially confusing. Are they transgender? Genderfluid? Who or what is the dot they constantly converse with in the unknown elsewhere? Is Lu possessed? Is their name Lu or Lou?

The book is decorated with pretentious, flowery language that at first reads like a breath of fresh air but quickly sours in the mouth. What does ‘The world is my shiver’ or ‘A walking apnea’ mean? These metaphors might seem sensible at first, but upon further inspection, they only had me furrowing my eyebrows and scratching my head trying to grasp their meanings. They are mere nothings, wordsalads capturing nothing on the page. I’m sorry if that sounds rude.

The sexual scenes.
The sexual scenes? Used very gratuitously, and without any addition to the plot. Okay, maybe at first they served a purpose. Tyler, Lou and Jill all use sex as a means of communing with the entities they encounter, highly suspected to be because of the heightened emotions during intimacy. This was oddly terrifying, that human emotions can breach into the unknown. But after a while, they become weightless, senseless, jarring and often discomforting when you’re left reading a whole page of intimacy drivel. And no, I’m not a conservationist when it comes to sex

I really did try to get what Negative Space was trying to convey. The confines of rural living, and how emancipation only comes from self-destruction. Sex, drugs and death. It aimed for a Lovecraftian feel, leaving one questioning rather than knowing. The sense of a celestial horror beyond our knowledge causing havoc and we’re all front-row viewers. It tried to create mystery and unease by having limitless, unanswerable questions. But instead, it only left me chasing that last page mark, eager to have it over.

I can’t say I hated Negative Space. I’d never hate literature that didn’t aim to harm and even reached for inclusion(sexuality and race are subliminal themes touched upon in these book), plus the novel has a really cool name. For me, it was a miss, but maybe you might enjoy it.