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.

It’s an established and sometimes awkward genre, the memoir or personal essay with forays into describing or analysing beloved artworks. But here it feels immediate and wholly convincing. A sculpture by Dorothy Cross based on the negative space inside a kiss, the “accusatory stare” of Saoirse Wall in a video self-portrait, the voice and presence of Doireann Ní Ghríofa as she reads her poetry aloud – all of this serves not as aesthetic or intellectual displacement of pain, but to ratify and enrich Leach’s understanding of it. When WHORL appeared in the book, the first drug that came to my mind was salvia, a drug my friends and I started hearing about probably in the late 90s, early 2000s. First came the rumors of kids committing suicide after taking salvia, and then came actual confirmed cases. The reported details around the high obtained from this drug did not hold much appeal to me, and I think our only interest came from the fact that salvia was legal and relatively easy to access through the mail, unlike other drugs which had to be procured from sketchy dudes you never wanted to actually hang out with, like this novel's character Kai (spot on, that).The use of negative space is a key element of artistic composition. The Japanese word " ma" is sometimes used for this concept, for example in garden design. [2] [3] [4] In a composition, the positive space has the more visual weight while the surrounding space - that is less visually important is seen as the negative space. [5] 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?

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).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. The use of negative space in art may be analogous to silence in music, but only when it is juxtaposed with adjacent musical ideas. As such, there is a difference between inert and active silences in music, where the latter is more closely analogous to negative space in art. Cristín Leach is The Sunday Times Ireland’s longest serving art critic. She has written about art for the paper since 2003. She is a writer and broadcaster, whose short fiction and personal essays have been published in Winter Papers and on RTE Radio 1 (Keywords 2020). Her art writing has also appeared in Irish Arts Review, on RTE.ie, in artist catalogues, and other publications. In 2018, she was shortlisted for Critic of the Year in the Newsbrands Ireland Journalism Awards. In 2021, she was Writer in Residence for the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival and was elected President of the Irish branch of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).

This book is intelligent, because it is subtle; esoteric, because it is subtle; and queer, because it is excessive beyond identity. 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. In general I don’t think I’ve like…ever read a horror novel that’s as burned into the fabric of my brain as this one tbh?? The unique writing vivifies every incident and I don’t think there was a single scene from my first reading that I forgot, but everything on reread STILL took me by surprise and many of it hit even harder than last time. Most of my memories even with books I love are in the abstract or in pivotal scenes but every scene here is stamped into my brain to a very rare extent only summoned by the most vivid writing and even when describing something inconsequential, the writing is memorable 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. 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: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.” Horrifying in a compulsively readable way, Negative Space charts the erratic and disturbing movements of a group of teens living in a small New Hampshire town. For these kids life in this town is a stultifying existence, as evidenced by the copious amount of drugs they consume. They take a lot of drugs, and I mean a lot of drugs. Popping pills first thing in the morning, smoking weed all day long, winding down in the evening with some shrooms or acid…and then there is WHORL. A rich experimental writing style weaving together age old Satanic-panic fears and their modern day manifestation. 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.