On Negative Space, adolescence and black metal: a conversation with B.R Yeager
B.R Yeager's Negative Space is not a novel like the others. Normal authors are trying to tell a story that's already been told from a different perspective or with new and interesting characters. This is not what this novel does at all. Holy shit, it couldn't be any more wrong.
Negative Space is one of these books that affect you physically. One that invokes feelings instead of words and images that don't quite settle in your mind. It's both oppressive and liberating. It's a powerful, unsettling experience that you should go through at least once in your life.
So I asked B.R Yeager everything I wanted to ask him and his answers didn’t disappoint me. I’m sure they won’t disappoint you either.
Ben: So, I just finished Negative Space and I get what the hype is about. It dragged me under water for over two weeks. Tell me everything, man. What the fuck? How did you end up writing such an intensely dark and oppressive novel?
B.R: It all traces back to my friend’s suicide, which I always feel weird bringing up, because even though it’s the truth it’s also a sensationalistic thing to say. It’s something that would be easy to use to raise the book’s cred, which would be insanely gross. But if we’re talking about the origins of the book there isn’t another way around it. (It helps that he was a very morbid guy, and obsessed with art that dealt with real pain and grief—like he was obsessed with Xiu Xiu—so I honestly think he would appreciate this.)
He was one of my closest and oldest friends, like a brother, and we even lived together in a place that was exactly like the apartment Tyler and Ahmir end up getting. And in 2012 he ends up taking his own life and I pretty much spend a year trying to numb myself and block out the grief.
Fast forward to 2013, the anniversary of his death, and I drive to where he is buried. Pulling into the cemetery, I see a dead turtle on its back, with its intestines pushed out its side. And right then I get the idea for a story about a group of twenty-somethings returning to their friend’s grave and discovering that his essence and rot has transformed the whole town. I go home and write this up as a short story, which ends up being a very rough (and bad) version of the last chapter of Negative Space, and I kind of leave it at that.
Around 2015 I start a novel that’s about Lu and Arnie, completely unrelated to Negative Space, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Then I start working on a novel about a warlock that lives in the mountains of the town where I was living at the time, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. I’m chasing ideas that I think are interesting but nothing feels like something I NEED to write. And that’s when I end up revisiting the short story, and the fact that I haven’t really grieved, and realizing that that’s what I need to be writing. So Negative Space ends up absorbing all these other ideas, and it becomes this thing that’s all about creating a world that’s immersed in that sense of grief and doom.
Ben: I don't think Negative Space is exploiting his death as much as Bell Witch’s album Mirror Reaper is exploiting the band's drummer's death. It's very much an homage. It makes even more sense now. Tell me, I gotta know: did you read Blake Butler’s 300 000 000 before this and if so, how would you say it influenced this book? I can't be the first one to make this parallel?
B.R: I actually only read 300 000 000 once I was already pretty far into the novel—I may have even been doing revisions at that point. But I definitely found it astonishing and resonant. It’s probably the most frightening work of fiction I’ve ever read. In terms of influence, it was likely just a push to do better.
Ben: I've read 300 000 000 many times since it came out in 2014 and reading your novel is the closest experience I've had to it. It was pitched to me as a more palatable version of it too. Did you struggle to find a publisher? Don't get me wrong, Negative Space is one of the most exciting novels I've read in a decade, but publishers interested in new and challenging ideas are few and far between. Familiarity sells.
B.R: I need to give it a full re-read. I have marked passages that I return to often, but I haven’t done a second full immersion in it. But yeah, that book is such an incredible experience.
Yes and no. I had initially gone the agent querying route, more just out of curiosity and because I’d never done that before. I wanted to see if it could operate in that realm. But it was rejected by everyone I sent it to, which I more or less expected. After that, Apocalypse Party was my number one pick—I loved his (Ben DeVos) aesthetic and mission and it just felt like a good fit. And apparently I was right—he contacted me to accept Negative Space for publication almost 24 hours later. And he’s proved to be an excellent publisher, with a great eye for unique and exciting books and a real dedication for preserving the integrity of the author’s vision. I couldn’t be happier with the way things turned out.
Ben: That makes sense. The novel is so strong, it kind of burrowed its own way into people's minds. Tell me, I was browsing for negative reviews of the book on Goodreads and Amazon and they are very few and far between. That surprised me because extreme stuff like Negative Space is bound to make some people feel uncomfortable. Did you get much negative feedback? If so, what kind of negative feedback did you get?
B.R: Oh totally—negative feedback tends to come in three varieties: “nothing happened,” “nothing made sense,” and “none of the characters are likeable.” Which, to me, is ideal negative feedback for this book, because it speaks more to the individual readers’ tastes than it does to the book itself. Negative Space very intentionally has the plot far in the background—I was much more interested in having the characters just hang out rather than actively push things forward, which a lot of people don’t like. I personally get bored with plot-centric narratives; I’m mostly into watching characters just hang out.
I also had “don’t explain anything” as a design principle, which I realize is very frustrating to a lot of people, but I’m the opposite. I’m almost always disappointed when a secret is revealed in a story, especially in horror, because nothing is less scary than knowing what’s going on.
As for the characters: they’re teenagers. I was an asshole as a teen, so were all my friends. It’s just an intense and volatile period where everyone is narcissistic and testing boundaries and still developing empathy. The people who think these characters are abnormally rotten either don’t remember what it’s like to be a teen, or know WAY nicer people.
So as far as negative reviews are concerned, I feel like these are pretty great, because they aren’t wrong. I practically agree with them. We just like different things.
Ben: Did you intend to write a horror novel with this book? Do you think if yourself as a horror writer? Because from my point of view, it kind of stumbled upon the genre if that makes sense.
B.R: Yeah, I definitely saw this and my previous book as being horror from the outset. Or I was at least purposefully trying to occupy that space. It’s a form that has always captured my imagination.
As to whether I think of myself as a horror writer, it depends on what I’m working on. Right now I’m working on a novel that is very much not horror—even wielding a broad definition it could never be mistaken for horror. But I’m also working on a short story collection that can and probably will be labeled horror. So I don’t know, I don’t think it’s particularly important. For me, writing has always been a matter of chasing something I feel passionate about, and with these last two books, part of what I felt passionate about was very frightening stories. But I’m feeling a bit spent on that, I need to exercise a different muscle.
Ben: After I tagged you in my review, the first thing you told me was "Great review bro, you totally got it. How did you get into black metal?" which I thought was quite interesting. Because the effect Negative Space had on me was more akin to black metal than any horror books. It felt almost like a sublanguage of the book. I might be grasping at straws here, but what drives you to extremes like this? As a creator and an audience.
B.R: This might sound like a bullshit answer, but as a creator I don’t see my work as particularly extreme, especially compared to people like Blake Butler, or Gary Shipley, or Grace Krilanovich. Or especially someone like Kenji Siratori. Those people are operating at a level far beyond me—it seems like more of a mystical practice, text as peyote button, whereas I’m still in the physical plane, concerned with telling my little stories. Like, I get that my stuff might feel more extreme than plot-driven, 3 act genre fiction, but that’s only because I’m pulling from the real wild stuff. But ultimately, it’s still operating within familiar narrative traditions. When you get down to it, Negative Space isn’t that divorced from a Stephen King novel. But with something like 300 000 000, it’s hard to trace where that’s emerging from. It feels completely cut off from tradition.
As an audience, I think it’s just a pursuit of new sensations and trying to stay sharp. I like art that forces me to approach it on its own terms, and that makes me think in different ways. Aesthetic comfort is creative death for me. So I seek out art that feels alien, that provides a shock to the system, because I need to develop new perspectives and ways of thinking in order to make my own art, otherwise I’ll get caught up in my old bullshit and stagnate.
Ben: What do you mean when you refer to your "old bullshit" creatively speaking?
B.R: Repeating myself, rehashing old territory. This was something I ran into in the past year and a half, where I ended up doing a few short stories about teens encountering the supernatural. And I’m still proud of those stories, but it felt too much like I was covering the same terrain. It was a real signal that I needed to get out of my comfort zone and try something new.
Ben: You've been mentioning teens a lot as a thematic obsession, which ties in to the parallels you make between your writing and Stephen King's. He's pretty obsessed with teens too. What is it about that period in life that interests you?
B.R: I think it has to do with the emotional intensity of that period, and the fact that when you’re younger you tend to fuck up more, to get in over your head more easily, and you can mine a lot of drama from that. Every little thing can feel apocalyptic, so it’s easy to transpose that onto actual apocalyptic scenarios. But I feel like I’ve hit a wall with what I can pull from youth. I’m not going to write about that period again, at least not for a while.
Ben: I hear you. Tell me about Lu's character. It's one of the parts in Negative Space I'm not sure I actually understood. At some point I was convinced he/she was the narrator telling the overall story. At some other, I doubted myself. Were there ideas your were trying to get across through him/her?
B.R: I think you’re pretty close. Out of the three narrators, she has the most distance from Tyler and the phenomena he’s wrapped up in, so her perspective is the closest we have to an objective account (which still is still far from objective—every narrator is unreliable). I think the crucial part is that she, unlike Ahmir or Jill, isn’t chasing after Tyler’s affection, which provides her with a unique perspective, one that may be akin to a narrator or historian.
Ben: See, I doubted myself because she seems like the first one who's breaking from reality. For entire chapters, she's just reciting screen and text colors. Ahmir felt to me like the more grounded one even if he's clearly in love with Tyler. Were the passages about gender and nonbinary sexuality planned from the start or did they happened organically?
B.R: I can definitely see that, especially as Lu is often experiencing things in a very synaethesic or psychedelic way—but that’s kind of the nature of this world. Ahmir and Jill are still more rooted to the material, but that’s where they get tripped up, unable or unwilling to see past that.
It’s hard to say that anything about this book was planned from the start, it was all very intuition-driven. Whenever I began overthinking something, that’s when it would start to fall apart, and I’d have to get back into a looser state. Everything about Lu or any of the characters just emerged organically, for the most part, and things I ended up overthinking or planning for the characters mostly got scrapped.
Another criticism the book frequently gets is the lull that occurs between Jill’s hospitalization and her and Ahmir’s return to Kinsfield, where the narrative momentum pretty much halts. And I definitely think that’s a valid criticism, and was even aware of this issue while writing it, but I didn’t see any other way. I had outlined alternate subplots for that section that probably would’ve been punchier and more engaging, but it never felt right. My gut instinct was to have this lull, it felt key even though it’s almost everyone’s least favorite part. But deep down I feel like the book would be worse off without it.
Ben: Here's a question I ask everyone I interview for the site. Tell me about the moment that made you want to create. Writing has this particularly where everyone is convinced they can do it until they try, but never do. What made you take the leap? Were you inspired by a certain work of art? By someone?
B.R: This is actually going to bring us back to the beginning of our talk.
The desire has always been there, and I’ve always loved stories and wanted to create my own. Just like everyone else, when I was little I was writing bad stories and concepts for movies and video games. But I had no discipline—I wanted a quality end result without putting in the work. So I’d start things, get bored and abandon them.
Then in high school all my friends were in bands, so I did that for years. And playing music is so much different from writing fiction—not to say playing music is easier or anything, but you can fake your way through music in a way you can’t with writing. Like, you put on enough effects and even one note can sound cool. It was an easy way to create without having to do the stuff that isn’t particularly fun (like honing your craft) when you’re undisciplined and more interested in partying. But I was still interested in telling stories, and I tried to incorporate that into music, getting real into writing lyrics and coming up with concepts and song titles and so on, so that scratched the itch a bit while also serving as practice.
But really it was my friend dying that completely kicked my ass and made me take stock. And that short story that eventually evolved into Negative Space was my first real attempt at writing and completing a story. Doing that made me realize it was something I could do, that I wanted to do, and—through the experience of editing myself—I could get better at if I put in the work.
It’s kind of weird and bittersweet to think about it like that, but I’m not sure if I would have been driven to write otherwise.
Ben: Do you think this event is what steered you to horror and exploring death in your writing in general?
B.R: No, that had always been there. I was obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe as a kid, and horror and the macabre in general, and it never really went away. The event just gave me some urgency.
I was trying to avoid bringing this up with your last question because it’s so on the nose and an aspect of it is pretty cringey, but the first book I read after he died was The World According to Garp. I was out of town for work, and I didn’t have anything to read, and I picked it up on a whim at a thrift store. And of course the book is about an author perpetually writing through his grief. So I think I saw something in that. It’s also a fairly romantic portrayal of being an author, and that appealed to me, which is the embarrassing part—the appeal of “author” as a cool identity to take on. But yeah, I’d be lying if I said that didn’t play a role in me finally taking writing seriously.
Ben: Weird question: Very few people earn a living writing. Is that your case? If not what do you do for a living? Did you go to school for something completely else? So many writers have different backgrounds, I'm curious.
B.R: This is a good topic, because there are many writers who sell quite a bit (and far more than I do) who still don’t make their living off writing. Those who do seem to make most of their living freelancing, doing editing and so on, but their main paychecks don’t seem to come from selling books.
I myself definitely don’t earn a living from writing alone (though the supplemental income is a big help). And freelancing doesn’t really appeal to me, so I’ve gone the day job route.
The past few years I’ve been an office administrator, which I got into from temp work. Previously I worked in a mental health rehab program, bartended, washed dishes, cleaned houses. Lots of other temp jobs. Nothing particularly exciting, but it’s served its purpose.
Ben: Do you WANT to write full-time even if it involves doing contractual work, ghostwriting or other less glamorous propositions?
B.R: Probably not—that would likely take me further away from the writing I want to do. Also, most contractual work seems to be in the realm of criticism and essay, which aren’t my strong points. I understand why full-time writing appeals to some people, and they get into it because they enjoy and excel at those formats. That’s just not the case for me.
Ben: How about other mediums like cinema or video games?
B.R: So here’s the exception! I’m extremely interested in writing for games—it’s a medium I’ve always been fascinated by—even though working in the games industry often sounds like a nightmare. There’s also very little demand specifically for writers, or at least there’s much more supply than there is demand. But if a studio was interested in having me write barks or item descriptions for them, I’d be down.
And with cinema, it’s on my list to finally learn how to write a proper screenplay. This past year I actually co-wrote a feature film with this director Nick Verdi, that debuted at the Salem Horror Fest. For that I mainly wrote voiceovers and a tiny bit of dialogue, but I’m definitely interested in exploring that further.
Ben: Anything you want to add before this end? Anyone or anything you want to plug? Anything you've been watching, reading or listening to that inspired you?
B.R: Thanks so much for doing this, I really appreciate it. Definitely want plug my guy Burial Grid, who did a incredible original soundtrack for Negative Space, but who more recently put out a new record that’s really beautiful
One book that floored me recently was The Wingspan of Severed Hands by Joe Koch, whose descriptive abilities are just absurd. Also really loving Inside the Castle’s expanded edition of Hunchback ‘88 by Chris Norris. Wild writing and equally wild design and layout.
Along similar lines of writing and design intersecting, Run Off Sugar Crystal Lake by Logan Berry is really terrific too—this kind of psychedelic reenvisioning of Friday the 13th.
Oh! I also have a story in Silent Motorist Media’s (R.I.P.) tribute anthology to Matthew Bartlett.
