Overall I think this is just downright the most effective “kids on bikes” small town atmosphere I’ve ever encountered in a horror novel, ESPECIALLY because nothing is sugar coated and as I said in my original review that this dying do-nothing town and all the freaks, stoners, eccentrics and junkies that inhabit it are so tangentially familiar to me. Near the end Jill muses about how state lines are arbitrary, that it’s all really the same thing copy and pasted forever, and jfc if that doesn’t speak volumes about capitalism itself and the cycle the youth of today grow up within, the one where we are all aware of as the abyss of the future awaits us like a void in space and can do nothing but fight against this entropy through some kind of broad radical action, whether personal, empathetic and based on identity (Lu) or self-centered, desiring to escape that entropy all together through trying to achieve some spiritual apotheosis (Tyler), etc. I’ll reiterate that I still think this is probably the best fictional portrayal of misspent alienated youth I have ever seen, which is impressive especially considering how this was written in 2020 and those tropes have long been utilized throughout the decades, centuries; Yeager’s just feels so distinctly generational and urgent in a way I’ve never seen it done before Lu’s story hit me even harder this time around and the ending of her arc, which confused me at first, felt even more brilliant, but it’s just everything about Lu I can’t get enough of; the genderfluidity and how it’s emblematic of the divide between who she IS and who everyone around her WANTS her to be and how this split is both physical and spiritual in a sense, and the fact she sees the world not through events but more like Feelings and Sensations that comprise events. Lu’s character works in a way that makes her abstract and intangible and at once the most complete person of the four protagonists because she is the only one who actually HAS an identity that is independent of the influence of others, fluid as it is, and it is the one thing she was able to surpass Tyler at, who never reached the “ascension” he so desperately desired while Lu on the other hand bursts from her cocoon (albeit in the most left-field sense). I want to write a lot more about her but I am going to need to ruminate even further because nothing short of an essay would encompass everything I feel abt Lu lmao This book transcends sexuality by presenting these teens as having seemingly no preference in who they love, are with, and are themselves (there is even a character who is often referred to as 'she' and 'he,' making it hard for the reader to know exactly who or what this person identifies as). I love how Yeager made it personal too by using ideas with great symbolic value. For example, the orange extension cord is used by many characters to hang themselves. This is one normal thing that almost every household owns in towns like these. Using such an item in such a distressing way is both a statement that a) this is what people do around these parts and b) The disconnect between kids and parents has been weaponized by reality, which leads me to my theory. 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.”

There are few books that capture so gracefully and so truthfully the way in which art and life weave and bleed together. Negative Space is a beautiful, profound, unique book.’ Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Librarians Group is the official group for requesting additions or updates to the catalog, including: Several times throughout the novel, intense trauma is followed by a jarring tonal shift in perspective. These shifts in point of view are effective in creating an atmosphere of dread and nausea as the story weaves itself together and tears itself apart simultaneously. That being said, the absence of one perspective can speak as loud as entire sections of another. A successful marriage of form and function. There’s a lot of potential for re-reads to give clarity and make connections that weren’t apparent the first time around.Firstly, it really feels like nothing happens for the entirety of the book. All the kids do for the entire length of the novel is take drugs, be shitty to each other, take part in rituals and occasionally abuse animals. Then they die. There is no overarching plot and there is no build up to anything. I really found it hard to care about anyone because all of the main characters (except Tyler to an extent) was really boring. She is uncommonly good at writing about being embodied. When she learns of her husband’s infidelity, she starts wringing her hands and notices for the first time that this is not only something that happens in books. As if to shout down cliches about finding one’s voice: “After my marriage breaks, I go to the top of a mountain and scream. The wind whips the sound away, disappearing it out of my mouth before it has even hit the air. I scream in the empty house. I scream at the empty house. I yell in the bath.” Testing her voice

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.Nothing is explained at ALL, not why the suicides are taking place in this town, the WHORL drug, why the two are connected, what the ritual they keep doing is, literally nothing. It doesn't even bother to explain anything.