BR Yeager and “Negative Space”: the horror of disintegrating into the other

The first hundred pages of “Negative Space” they feel relatively familiar if one knows the classics of horror literature. The story takes place in the present the protagonists are three teenagers from Kinsfield, a town in New Hampshire where there’s not much to do but get high and go to a pizzeria, surrounded by woods and undergrowth, with darkness beyond its urban borders. The boys revolve around their friend Tyler, darker than them, more adventurous, with an interest in sorcery. There’s a mysterious drug they chew that gives them visions, but it can be bought at any supermarket. There is suicides, a first, then another, a wave is forming and suicide becomes a norm. In the thicket beyond the borders is an abandoned house that belonged to an old writer, a place that is the seat of an occult power. But “negative space” it is not about that in its final form.

The voices of these three boys, its protagonists, intertwined between urban legends reported in Internet forums, among mass shootings from high school and friends who come back from the dead as saints. There is a naturalness in the text to tell about sex and death which is precious. The book is told with the voices of the three protagonists. Yeager has them sing to each other in an atmosphere of putrefaction, where towers of all the awful build up without shouting or saying obvious things. And this choral song is the tragedy of “Espacio Negativo”: it is the horror of disintegrating into the other.

The book –Published in Argentina by Caja Negra for its fiction collection Collateral damage, which explores the boundaries of culture – serves a purpose because Yeager refuses to rehash the genre and tell the same old thing in a different way. Claim a little for yourself one of Stephen King’s most triumphant things, the expedition of teenagers to the world beyond, but it does not endow it with epic or hope, there is no victory. The contemporary Gothic of the records of King Diamond, singer of Mercyful Fate and master narrator, does not exist in the text, or the horror of the adult world, the bourgeois horror as CE Feiling called it in his course at the Rojas Cultural Center, which we find in the voluptuous cynicism of Clive Barker and his books of bloodor the capacity of Thomas Ligotti, who makes language a terrible fact in itself and constructs everything to strike with an almost imperceptible subtlety. Worst of all in the book is love, as if the beautiful prophecies of Roy Orbison’s songs about total self-cancellation had turned into curses. Kingsfield, the name of the town where it occurs, It is an etymological irony, sorority field.

SO, “Negative Space” participates in a superior discussion. It does not belong to the cultural conversation of those who structure themselves with market news. It has the potential to be a formative book, a book that can be researched to build an identitysomething that in the 21st century is a rarity.

The ace legends of creepy pasta – Internet stories, news repeated over and over again, such as the challenges of Momo or the blue whale– are part of the spirit of “Negative Space”, but do not define it. Other contemporary traditions run through it. Yeager is also the author of Pearl Deatha fragmented horror story in a deck of cards.

Yeager, however, says in a dialogue with GlobeLiveMedia that the Internet is important, but not.

“Honestly, I’m not a huge creepypasta fan. Maybe I didn’t find the right ones, but all the ones I read were disappointing, probably because they’re so easy to refute. But urban legends are still powerful. Something like the Blue Whale Challenge is fascinating on a social level, the fact that a moral panic is sweeping the planet. It is proven that it was all just a hoax, but whether it was a real danger is still up for debate. It catches my attention, phenomena that confuse fact and fiction, creating a new reality,” says the author.

-Geography marks the text. There is no way out in Kingsfield but death. It’s something that seems very classic, America deep like a belly of darkness. Can this reason be updated?

-I don’t know how this topic can be updated. It’s something I tried in “Negative Space”, but I’m not the only one to say if I succeeded or not. If I did, I don’t know how. The best I can do is delve into my personal experiences, find interesting stories that no one else has, and recast them into a made-up narrative. There are extremely talented people who can draw literary magic from history books and lives completely disconnected from their own, but I have drawn from my own life and the lives of those around me. “Negative Space” is set in the Northeastern United States simply because I live there. If I had grown up in the desert, the book would be about the desert.

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-Teenage suicide is a constant in the book. It’s usually a very sensitive subject, almost taboo in Western fiction and horror. It’s almost crossing a line. And current horror is very safe, to sort of define it.

– Suicide is at the heart of the book, I didn’t really think of suicide as a taboo. It is inseparable from the book itself, much more than the supernatural elements. Without suicide, there would be no “negative space”. The book is, at its core, a song to a deceased friend. I agree that today’s horror is very moderate, but I’m not writing with the express intention of crossing a line or shocking people. It bothers me a lot. Is it sold out. Vulnerability, opacity and ambiguity are much more intense resources, which is what I like to pursue.

You can’t talk about horror without talking about cinema. The current conversation of the genre is dominated by cinema, or almost exclusively by the current practice of the genre, with fashion directors like Ti West or Panos Kosmatos -who remix well-known elements with their own aesthetic intensity-, beyond the best-selling literary phenomena like Mariana Enriquez. The era of grand adaptations, which were the backbone of horror films, is over.

– Do you think that literature and cinema are separated today? Is the new taste of cinema raising the bar of writing or quite the opposite?

-I think the genre is at its best when it’s not so popular, when it’s underrated. Now it’s more popular than ever, making horror massively medium hair. I don’t think they separated, but rather mixed into the same gray mush, at least in America. The problem is money. Today, horror is lucrative, leading to flooding every market, but few of these works take risks or push in new directions. Those are not as seen, with a few exceptions. Nostalgia rules everything, now it does giallos slack But I’m sure there are cool and exciting things that I don’t know. I recently read a novel that was very well received, but in the end it was just a mix of resources and obvious references. It had nothing to do with anything real. The great designers that everyone loves have taken from their lives. Today, so many authors are content to write remixes of films they have seen. They contain no single truth, personality or perspective. But of course there are interesting things growing in the shadows. There’s a kind of provocative, hyper-philosophical horror literature that’s emerged over the past decade, with authors like Gary Shipley and Charlene Elsby. Their work is based on risk and broken edges, they express ways of thinking that show the world in a new and terrifying way. Today, so many products aspire to scare you, but they rarely succeed. True horror makes you see the whole world and inhabiting it as deeply terrifying, with no way to escape.

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