The Queer Horror of Negative Space

A few weeks ago, I read the horror novel Negative Space by B. R. Yeager. I loved it in all its oppressive, disturbing, befuddling glory, and while it is certainly not for everyone, it made me take a fresh look at the way queer fiction is conceptualized. Make no mistake, Negative Space IS a queer novel, despite the lack of narrative tags or tropes that might make it obvious. No character ever utters the words gay, lesbian, or other markers of a fixed identity; there is no coming-out plotline, no persecution by ignorant townsfolk; in the uncontrollable chaos of their lives, the teenage characters flow from partner to partner, identity to identity, denying to the reader the stability and sense of understanding provided by labels. The queerness of Negative Space is a queerness of excess, of overflowing beyond identity itself.


Negative Space takes place in a fictional city struggling with unemployment, ennui, and teenage deaths. It follows three(?) teenage protagonists linked only by their age and their connection to Tyler, a charismatic and unstable force of both tricksterish malice and bottomless sadness. This traditional setup falls off more and more steeply as the novel progresses, revealing a hidden reality governed by unfamiliar and terrifying principles. It is through this ontological instability that the novel’s queerness becomes apparent.


In a piece written for the website Literary Hub, author Brandon Taylor writes that “Shame, pain, and an intense desire to assimilate are the most legible aspects of queer life as perceived by the heteronormative overculture.” Notably, the same characteristics of shame, pain and desire to assimilate resonate equally well with another demographic: teenagers. The novel takes this resonance and uses it to queer teenage adolescence itself, a state in which identity is in constant flux. The characters have as little desire to make it through their teenage years to the promised stability of adulthood as they do in defining their gender or sexual preferences, and while they certainly experience shame and pain, any desire to assimilate is stymied by a world that, in true horror fashion, is revealed as fundamentally hostile to their existence. The town’s epidemic of teenage deaths reveals life itself to be an unstable state, one further destabilized by the unexplained return of one of the dead later on in the novel. The pervasive queer rejection of fixed identity seems almost to dissolve the veil between life and death.


The character of Lu is perhaps the most strikingly destabilized identity of the novel, offering the reader very little in the way of fixed markers. Pronouns vary depending on the speaker, name spelling switches abruptly between Lu and Lou, and their internal monologue is peppered with synesthesia. Guesses could be made about what terms might fit Lu, but the novel never makes any attempt to tell the reader anything for certain. As before, Negative Space has no interest in reaching a settled state. Just as the teenage protagonists never seem to reach the stability promised by adulthood, Lu’s identity spirals outwards, becoming ever more unconstrained as the story plays out.


Negative Space is difficult to talk about. It resists description, just like its characters.

You can experience Negative Space for yourself by purchasing the book through our website.