Book Review : B.R Yeager - Burn You the Fuck Alive (2023)
The best horror stories all have a point in common : when you start them, you don’t know exactly what to be afraid of. They corrupt the fabric of common existence and open a gap in what you thought was solid ground. B.R Yeager’s novel Negative Space was a breakout success precisely because of that. It transformed the small town adolescent experience into a psychedelic fucking nightmare, making the book relatable in the best (worst) possible way. It was something that could’ve happened to you too.
I’m glad to announce that B.R Yeager wasn't a one hit wonder and that he's got plenty more where it comes from in his new short story collection, amicably titled Burn You the Fuck Alive.
This bad boy contains twenty stories that range from one paragraph to fifty-something pages of thoroughly original and unpredictable storytelling. The opener Waxing Moon is a great example of what makes B.R Yeager such a standout horror writer. It starts with the most relatable and mundane line : "Your son is thirty and still can't take care of himself," and slowly deconstructs a monster build out of neediness and irresponsibility. You thought a vampire bite was scary? Try providing your child everything he could ever need. The absence of longing and purpose will sure carve out a fiend.
The Horrors of the Self
I had two favourite stories in the collection. The first was Poison Nurse, which depicts the twisted relationship between a beautiful, but troubled nurse and her clients. Her longing to be desired and her ravenous need for control after being controller herself by sickness most of her life. Yeager uses so shrewdly a second person narrative to distance the nurse from her memories and make the duality in her emerge. We're not all fucked up caregivers, but the gracefulness of the nurse's contradiction was super relatable.
In the Shadow of Penis House was the other story from Burn You the Fuck Alive that stood out to me. It is as abstract and alarming as the title indicates. Mostly delivered through a series of Magic : The Gathering Cards, it walks you through a series of rooms, introduces you to shadowy characters and ominous circumstances. Either something tragic has happened there or something tragic will. I don’t have any insight on what the story means, but it feels like the dislocated worldview of an abuse survivor.
There's nowhere safe. No one to turn too. Everything and everyone has turned inwards or away from you. It's suffocating in a way only B.R Yeager knows how to be.
Young People is deserving of mention too for being a too rare example of good pandemic fiction. Two young folks in love and working from home kidnap their boss who may or may not be a sex predator. This one works because the young lovers are both afraid of what this supervisor might possibly be, but also afraid of who they’re turning into. There's an aura of paranoia and brokenheartedness hovering over this short story that makes it both extremely romantic and tense in a Hitchcockian kind of way.
The Future is Not The Past
Another way Burn You the Fuck Alive manages to be unsettling is by fucking with the conventions of what a written story is supposed to look like. There's a good number of microfictions (let’s say 1000 words, more or less) in this collection, but they’re almost all delivered outside of the norms. Autocastrato is literally one sentence long, but it is delivered with such poetic brutality that it forces you to stop and consider the quickness and the violence of what you've just read. It’s short and by no means easy. A whisper of doom.
The title story is one of these quick raps written in a series of aggressive and mysterious statements that feel like they’ve been written by someone dangerous and ill-intended. He Just Takes It is circular and repetitive, like a lo-fi black metal song, but each added layer paints the one it’s added on in a more vile and tragic light. It’s both surreal and a lot like reading crime headlines. This duality B.R Yeager entertains between hyperreality and the subconscious is really what makes the unique appeal of his horror.
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Any dog can have his day in publishing. Any author can hit it big with one book. What's difficult is to replicate success over and over again and create a paradigm that is both yours and relatable to whoever picks up your books. B.R Yeager proved he's not a one hit wonder with Burn You the Fuck Alive. It's very much a thematic offspring to his cult hit Negative Space and a continuation of his exploration of this world that's trapped between our every day mundane existence and our worst nightmares.
