Let me first get to what I enjoyed about the book. I did enjoy the alternating point of views shown of 3 main characters in the first person perspective. I also liked how there is a fourth protagonist who we only read about strictly from the narrative of the other three people. I haven’t read many books but I thought this was really creative and it made this medium was enjoyable. Other then this, I really don’t know how I feel about the contents of the book itself. Negative Space is a beautiful book – raw, honest, and vulnerable. Searingly intimate and thought-provoking.’

Along with this existential dread is also the pain of being a teenager in a world where there is only drugs, sex, and death constantly surrounding you. Social media plays a huge part here too in spreading the disease of suicide and darkness. It is frightening to watch how much the teenagers rely on it and all the innocence that can be destroyed through the exploration of its unlit corners. 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. I want to preface this by saying that I hold no judgement towards anyone who enjoys this book. This post comes purely from an inquisitive standpoint, not a malicious one. an unflinching self-exploration of a woman at various major life stages, not to mention a refreshing portrait of a very modern Irish marriage breakdown, divorce and family break-up.’ Press your ear to this book, and you will hear the tumultuous soundscape of a life, in all its joys and sorrows and wonderings.’

Navigate

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.’ Yet what makes Negative Space truly unique is Yeager’s unsentimental and refreshingly modern treatment of queerness and gender identity, which is seamlessly folded into the narrative without devolving into patronising tokenism. Yeager’s depiction of Lu, an alienated trans-woman living under the conservative rule of her parents, attests to this, in that she never outwardly declares or dramatically explains her gender identity to the reader. Rather, her identity is inferred only through the dissonances between the three separate narrators. Ahmir, as well as other peripheral characters, call her ‘Lou’ and refer to her in masculine pronouns; while Lu calls herself ‘Lu’ and uses feminine pronouns, which Jill also employs. Indeed, this device is utilised so subtly that it wasn’t until I was mid-way through the book that I made the connection, which surprised me without obstructing the narrative flow or feeling like a blatantly artificial construction. Lu’s queerness, in other words, feels both natural and unforced within the confines of the story, which is a testament to Yeager’s skill as a writer.

Negative Space is one of the truly great, smart horror novels I’ve had the pleasure to read in my thirty-nine laps around the sun. It was both an emotional journey and a skin-crawling experience. It shows obvious influence from Blake Butler’s monolith 300 000 000, but it is also indebted to Clive Barker and H.P Lovecraft. This novel will make your feel ugly and vulnerable in the best possible way, like someone stared into your soul and looked at every little imperfection.Cave, Alessandra (2013). Shooting with Soul: 44 Photography Exercises Exploring Life, Beauty and Self-Expression - From Film to Smartphones, Capture Images Using Cameras from Yesterday and Today. Beverly, MA: Quarry Books. p.125. ISBN 978-1-59253-871-3. This specific quote made me ache inside, "I dreamed about a supercomputer that could erase anything in existence. First I erased all the spiders. Then I erased all the people, including myself. I wasn't there anymore, but I could still think and remember, and I wept and wept, wanting to be all the way gone."

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. 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." In art and design, negative space is the empty space around and between the subject(s) of an image. [1] Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such space occasionally is used to artistic effect as the "real" subject of an image. 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. In recent years there has been a flourishing of Irish women who have written very different testimonies to the experience of womanhood in Ireland. This forms an elegant counterpart.’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

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.The characters are all the same and all super annoying. There was no point to the multiple POVs because they weren't differentiated at all. No character development or growth. Tyler is literally the worst throughout the whole book and never gets better. I didn't feel bad for any of them. 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. 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.