There is no doubt that the writings of H. P. Lovecraft have enjoyed a significant renaissance of late. In both literary academia and mainstream culture, his idiosyncratic oeuvre has now been properly recognised for codifying and popularising a unique form of horror commonly known as ‘The Weird’. In an essay written by Lovecraft himself, aptly titled ‘Notes on Writing Weird Fiction’, he deftly outlines the specifics of this distinct sub-genre, explaining how his own particular brand of horror stories evoke a disturbing and fearful sense of the unknown by violently exposing his characters to an insidious alterity that exists beyond the bounds of human reason and perception.
As Lovecraft himself explains, all weird stories are characterised by “some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.” Thus, the terror of Lovecraft’s weird fiction is premised on an external, alien reality (or ‘The Outside’ as it is sometimes called) infiltrating or encroaching upon the known terrestrial-empirical world of humanity, therein causing unfathomable horrors and mind-shattering anomalies to occur within the time-space continuum. Indeed, the metaphysical implication that throbs consistently within all his stories, regardless of character or plot, is the inability of human consciousness to fully grasp the true and essentially monstrous nature of reality itself. To quote the much-cited passage which opens Lovecraft’s most famous short story The Call of Cthulhu
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far.
The influence and legacy of The Weird still reverberates in popular culture today, as evidenced in the ever-growing number of films, videogames and television shows which adopt (and adapt) Lovecraft’s peculiar style and vision of horror. To my mind, one of the most bizarre yet entirely captivating examples of this is B.R. Yeager’s hallucinatory novel Negative Space, which has been hailed by author Blake Butler as “a collision between Dennis Copper’s George Miles Cycle and Beyond the Black Rainbow.”
Set in the isolated city of Kinsfield, the book is told through three different perspectives: Jill, Ahmir, and Lu, all of whom are frustrated teenagers suffering from the kinds of social malaise engendered by growing up in a small, conservative town. Sex, drugs, and internet forums act as their primary means of escape from the drudgery that currently besets them, which Yeager articulates with an unsparing sense of realism that is both shocking yet relatable. Besides their shared age and setting, what fundamentally links all three characters and their separate narrations to one another is their association with the enigmatic Tyler, a shadowy loner who possesses an alien charisma that is simultaneously seductive yet dangerous. In addition to performing self-mutilating rituals and reading subterranean philosophical treatises on the metaphysical nature of reality, Tyler consumes copious amounts of a drug called WHORL, which allows him to temporarily perceive an otherworldly space inhabited by ghostly abstractions and entities, violently distorting the user’s sense of time and space in the process. In one unnerving scene, Ahmir, who takes WHORL with his then girlfriend Cindy for the first time, describes the experience as such:
“The world titled and bent, trapezoidal, before snapping to a hex. The space crawled. The branches shook. A thousand black strings crawled from Cindy’s face. The space flapped and whispered, nothing I could understand, and went bleary with a million strands. Each one with a name I couldn’t remember. It pulled my body apart.”
This nightmarish zone made accessible by WHORL remains ominously ambiguous throughout Negative Space, and its influence on the town is left spookily undefined: is it the cause of the decades-long suicide epidemic in Kinsfield? Is someone using these indeterminate entities as a means of exacting revenge? Or, is this realm a hellish form of purgatory, a spectral catchment full of wandering souls once belonging to the suicidal townsfolk? While the story obliquely gestures to each of these interpretations in kind, with particular attention being paid to whether Tyler is the conjurer or conduit of these unspeakable forces, the real strength of the novel is its refusal to settle on any one answer, instead harnessing vagueness and obscurity as a fertile source of dread and terror.
Consequently, the horror of the novel principally lays in Yeager’s ability to radically de-centre the reader’s perspective, to consistently yet subtly confuse, disorient and challenge our sense of what is truly happening throughout the narrative. Like Jill, Ahmir, and Lu, we are never given an objective account of why the events in the book are happening and their meaning and relation to one another is left uncertain. By denying the reader any God-like overview of the plot and, instead, entrapping us within the subjectivities of the three main characters, Yeager renders the novel disturbingly vertiginous and mutant, in the sense that the course of the book’s events seems to abide by some accursed logic unknowable to both the characters and reader. Without any accompanying explanation or justification, the dead are randomly brought back to life, characters transform into billowing rags of skin, and ethereal filaments of blackness writhe and crawl over the entirety of the townsfolk without them realising. Indeed, this reaches a spectacularly dizzying crescendo in the book’s finale, where any shred of rhyme or reason completely dissolves into apocalyptic visions of turtles falling from the sky to their bloody deaths as horrid geese-like creatures murderously stalk the now desolated wastelands of Kinsfield.
While this approach no doubt risks turning Negative Space into a nonsensical parade of pseudo-surrealist grotesqueries – akin to William S Burroughs’ Naked Lunch – Yeager’s portrayal of his three narrators effectively imbues the narrative with an authentic sense of realism. In his foundational text The Weird and the Eerie, cultural critic and theorist Mark Fisher argues that Lovecraft’s fiction is dependent upon the known human world in order to generate the weird’s powerful sense of difference. In essence, the weird needs the terrestrial world of humanity “for much the same reason that a painter of a vast edifice might insert a standard human figure standing before it: to provide a sense of scale.” Thus, in order to properly capture the “hideous unknown” so central to weird fiction, the human characters and scenes have to be constructed genuinely and authentically, stripped of any “catch-penny romanticism.” Yeager’s novel follows this same principle, in the way his characterisations avoid the stereotypes and cliches usually seen in mainstream depictions of adolescence. More precisely, the realism of Negative Space is primarily conveyed through the fallible and imperfect nature of Yeager’s three main characters, as their personalities appear ridden by all kinds of contradictory desires and insecurities which consequently drive them to behave and act in certain ways that are, at times, selfish and reprehensible but, nevertheless, understandable. In other words, none of the characters are flattened into idealised ciphers of heroism or moral righteousness – as is usually the case in much fantasy and science fiction – but, instead, remain emotionally complex and believably three-dimensional throughout the course of the narrative, which only heightens and adds to the atmospheric intensity and ambiguity of the book’s nameless horror.
Yet what makes Negative Space truly unique is Yeager’s unsentimental and refreshingly modern treatment of queerness and gender identity, which is seamlessly folded into the narrative without devolving into patronising tokenism. Yeager’s depiction of Lu, an alienated trans-woman living under the conservative rule of her parents, attests to this, in that she never outwardly declares or dramatically explains her gender identity to the reader. Rather, her identity is inferred only through the dissonances between the three separate narrators. Ahmir, as well as other peripheral characters, call her ‘Lou’ and refer to her in masculine pronouns; while Lu calls herself ‘Lu’ and uses feminine pronouns, which Jill also employs. Indeed, this device is utilised so subtly that it wasn’t until I was mid-way through the book that I made the connection, which surprised me without obstructing the narrative flow or feeling like a blatantly artificial construction. Lu’s queerness, in other words, feels both natural and unforced within the confines of the story, which is a testament to Yeager’s skill as a writer.
While this tactic undoubtably enhances the realism of the book – which is semi-modernist in its splintered, stream-of-consciousness style of prose – it also reinforces the precarious status of the reader, in the sense that nothing is directly or neatly given to us. There are no clear answers in Yeager’s novel, only hints and clues encrypted within each of the character’s narrations which, on careful reading, give way to a less opaque picture of the world of Negative Space. And yet, just as we start to become familiarised with the characters and setting, the book’s horror almost immediately intensifies, thereby causing whatever comforting awareness we have of the narrative to warp and shatter. Realism, in this sense, is used only to lure us further into the seemingly ‘unreal’ depths of the unknown.
If the power of weirdness resides in its ability to radically critique our anthropocentric conceptions of the world around us, then Yeager’s Negative Space is an undeniably weird book. Devoid of the usual tactics which distance readers from a story’s action or plot, Yeager situates us directly within the narrative, forcing us to experience the ethereal terrors of his novel as if we are one of its narrators. Lacking any omnipresent elucidation or perspective, the book’s horror is thus generated by a visceral sense of unknowing, whereby our powers of reason and logic (as articulated through Jill, Ahmir, and Lu) are disabled and undone by some dark, overwhelming ‘force’ of alien origins. In this regard, perhaps what scares us most in Yeager’s novel is the incomprehensible nature of the horror itself. We, like the book’s three main protagonists, are left hopelessly and wretchedly unsure of what is truly terrorising the people of Kinsfield and why this is so. With no stabilising conclusion or rationalising explanation available, Negative Space leaves us to simply gaze upon the “black seas of infinity” from the crumbling shorelines of human consciousness, to watch the abyssal waters of the Outside mesmerically thrash, churn, and swell around us with callous indifference. The experience is horrifying and disturbing but, nonetheless, enrapturing.
Patrick Zaia is an artist, writer and musician based in Queensland, Australia. He has previously written for Horror Homeroom on Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018).
