There’s nothing quite as annoying as reading a book that you want so badly to love, only to be forced, witnessing fumble after fumble, to reconcile yourself to your dislike of it. That was my experience with Negative Space, a story of teenage suicide and drug experimentation set in a small city in New England. Unfortunately, it commits several cardinal sins that are more horrifying that almost anything the story itself has to offer. I list these in no particular order:
Hey, remember that brief plot description I wrote above? Sounds pretty interesting, right? Bad news: it’s all fucking witchcraft! The idea of a truly inexplicable suicide epidemic (we’re talking dozens of people per year in a single town) is much scarier than black magic could ever be. But, hey, is the witchcraft itself interesting? No! This aspect is simultaneously over and underexplored. Seemingly every character except the limpdick narrators has an intimate knowledge of it, but it somehow, SOMEHOW remains basically a background element. There is, therefore, grounding in neither reality nor in unreality; the former isn't believable, and the latter is little more than set dressing.
The narrators are so damn boring I almost put the book down at several points just so I wouldn’t have to spend more time with them. There are more interesting characters in the wings, too: Tyler is pretty fascinating throughout, and when the best character abruptly shows up 2/3 of the way through, I thought to myself that I wish they’d been the POV characters. Instead, we’re stuck with a trio of passive idiots who I can only imagine standing around slack-jawed while witnessing terrible things befall the people of their town. How these morons never manage to put two and two together, I'll never know. Wait, I do know: it's lazy writing.
Yeager simply has no idea where to take this story. Most of it is spent following the teens around as they do drugs, fuck, and play with powers beyond their control. Again, this sounds more interesting than it actually is. It's like Trainspotting, but instead of heroin, they're all doing Ambien. The narrative progression is almost non-existent in the first half, and while the second half is markedly more propulsive, Yeager creates that propulsion by throwing in unearned curveballs, shrugging, and saying “Ooooooh isn’t inexplicable cosmic horror so spoooooky, look at that spooky slime on the wall!”
Roughly 1/3 of this novel is spent in dream sequences. I will say nothing more on this point.
I don’t use the words “MFA writing” lightly, but this is MFA writing. I don’t even know if Yeager has an MFA. It just fits the bill too darn well. Of course, ask any two people what MFA writing is and they’ll give you two wildly divergent answers, so I can only answer for myself: to me, MFA writing is overwrought-yet-nonsensical prose that strains for self-importance. I’ll flip through the book at random and compile a few of the greatest hits here:
“The sweaty skins and muscles packed in tight like clots of flies.”
“Boston was what castles must have been like, packed with women and men with knives in their faces.” (Note: this line is spoken by an autistic narrator who expresses sadness as “going blue” and anger as “giving knives.” To me this seemed like little more than cutesy authorial bullshit.)
“Marlon squinted. Small valleys carved across his forehead.”
“The bog opened up into void.”
“It felt like the world was shrinking with each moment flitting by. Atmosphere collapsing on my oxygen [what the fuck does this even mean], rendering my breath to thin, shallow gasps.”
“I let myself break, crying and puking and pissing and shitting myself [lol]”
“The stench of shit and rot, and the wind roaring in your ears to remind you you’re falling. Serpents beneath the mud in slumber and names you could give to things. All that was so long ago and will never be again.”
“Inauthentic,” really, is the way I’d describe this book. It’s fiction, yes, but none of it rings true. Even the parts that I’d normally consider well-observed, like the tendency in small towns and cities for rich kids to LARP at being rednecks, are undermined by parts that are equally bizarre. When one narrator arrives at her girlfriend’s house in rural Pennsylvania to find a very happy family (clearly intended to act as a contrast to the toxic families in her own hometown) smoking weed while playing fiddles and washboards around a bonfire, their physical descriptions ripped straight out of a cookbook labeled “MeeMaw’s Homemade Vittals" that's sold for $29.99 in Barnes & Noble, I knew Yeager had never once set foot in rural Pennsylvania.
Then, on the next page, we discover that lesbians in the countryside will apparently pleasure each other with fresh-picked ears of corn. If you've ever picked a fresh ear of corn, you'll know that this would be rather painful and unsanitary.
Of course, I can forgive all of this for one simple reason. Near the end of this book, around the point where one of the characters is attacked by a giant man-goose (I shit you not and will explain no further), I realized something that made it all make sense: BR Yeager is actually a pseudonym for Stephen King! Stevey boy, you dog. I knew you had to be up to something other than twiddling away at Bluesky with your decrepit neoliberal thumbs. This was a daring step for you, and one that I’d applaud if it weren’t the literary equivalent of Jimmy Buffett pursuing freeform jazz. Better luck next time.
i loved this book but this was a hilarious review. i do think yeager bites off a bit more than he can chew and that the story feels a little lost, at points. i prefer amygdalatropolis for this reason. feels much more grounded and focused, and the things it has to say about online radicalization and the degeneracy enabled by anonymity are very interesting.