People don’t understand Connecticut, which I don’t blame them for. The state where I grew up has offered the world influential cultural products like John Mayer, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, and people who really want you to know they went to Yale. At one job, after someone found out I grew up in Connecticut, they insisted that I must have owned horses. But the truth is a lot more depressing than that.
When I came of age the opioid epidemic was in full force. Almost everyone I knew and hung out with was taking OxyContin, usually stolen from their parents' medicine cabinets. Some of them moved on to harder drugs. Some of them died. No piece of fiction has accurately captured what it felt like to live and grow up around so much death and depression in the way that the novel Negative Space by B. R. Yeager has.
I read this book in two days, and then went back to the beginning and read it again. It is a book about young people pushed and pulled by their own compulsions: sex, drugs, magic, getting out of their depressed town. Initially published in 2020, I discovered it after it had been recommended several times on the subreddit Weird Lit, which has had a high hit rate with me in the past. It is not only a truly horrifying book—viscerally disgusting in some places, leaving me with images I’ll never forget and sometimes still dream of—but an affecting portrait of a kind of town I know all too well.
Taking place in the fictional town of Kinsfield, New Hampshire, Negative Space is the story of Tyler, told through the viewpoints of his friends. There’s Ahmir, who’s known Tyler the longest and is territorial about their friendship, one of loose boundaries that largely revolves around doing drugs together. Then there’s Jill, the girlfriend Tyler met in a mental hospital, who he treats worse and worse as the book goes on. Lastly, there’s Lu, born Lou, but on the internet message boards where she talks with Tyler she calls herself Misty. All these people love and hate Tyler, sometimes at the same time. But they’re also drawn to him and his obsessions, unable to escape the web he’s spun around himself. Ultimately, they all try to know Tyler, to be a person who could save him from his eventual self-destruction. On the first page of the novel, Ahmir says, “It was the way he just threw his body away. … Everyone knew Tyler was going to die young.”
In Kinsfield, people constantly commit suicide. According to Lu, starting in 1954, over a hundred people killed themselves in this town in one year, and every year dozens of people do the same. When Ahmir and Tyler find a crowd surrounding a hanging corpse outside a decrepit bowling alley, it doesn’t phase them. They take pictures, hang out until the cops show up. It is the 31st suicide in Kinsfield that year.
Looking at the body, Ahmir thinks to himself, “All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.”
The only thing to do in Kinsfield other than gawk at the suicides is drugs. In particular, Tyler is obsessed with a gas station drug called “whorl.” He buys whorl in tiny silver packages, and it comes in the form of dry, purple grey leaves that you can smoke or ingest. What whorl does to a person when they smoke it is hard to determine. When Ahmir smokes it, he sees the entire world unravel into millions of thin black strings. Other characters use it as a magical catalyst, giving them the ability to transcend material reality, or to see forwards and backwards in time. For other people, it simply turns them insane. Honestly, it’s not dissimilar to the old wives' tales my friends and I used to tell each other about salvia, a then-popular not-quite-weed gas station drug that makes people hallucinate, only this one does something to your soul that you can never really recover from.
“just smoked whorl for the first time,” one person writes on the message boards where Lu and Tyler talk about the Kinsfield suicides, “saw my dad and my dog (both died last year). they were folded up on the bed like a pile of clothes, or draped on the door like a towel. worst thing that’s ever happened to me. anybody got tips for dealing with this shitty come down :(((((“
Negative Space drowns in dread. All of these teenagers are doomed, in big and small ways. They never recover from knowing and having loved Tyler. Some of them end up trapped in their grief both literally and metaphysically, chained to Kinsfield as a ghost, doomed by the way that Tyler intersected with their lives. The whole novel is an exercise in trying to know someone who refuses to be known, who is so damaged that they run head first at self-destruction every day. Its plot weaves itself together slowly, packing on recurring images and symbolism until you feel the other shoe about to drop down, smashing all the characters flat. I have never felt so much anxiety about a Volkswagen Passat, which Jill dreams about dying in repeatedly. Every time she got into a car, I waited for a mention of its make or model, wondering to myself, “Is this the time? Is it now?”
Throughout the book, Tyler grows crueler and crueler. The meaner Tyler acts to his friends, the more psychedelic the book becomes. At times, chapters will intercut between Ahmir’s suicidality, Lu’s deep trauma from having to mask her true self, and Jill’s esoteric monologues.
“The world has been emptied,” Jill says, late into the book. “All space. No footing or oxygen left. I’m not even here. I was only here a long time ago, when there was still blood and stars and buildings. Eyes that see and insects with barbed ends. The stench of shit and rot, and the wind roaring in your ears to remind you you’re falling. Serpents beneath the mud slumber and names you could give to things. All that was so long ago and will never be again.”
Despite how little hope exists in the world of Negative Space, I grew to love these teenagers deeply. Ahmir, a black teenager doing hoodrat stuff with his friends, was frequently a standout just because of how familiar his patterns felt to me. He raps to his friend’s homemade beats in his car while they drive around. He is constantly picking up, dropping off, or ditching his bike. He has a younger sister who he loves but is distant from, not wanting her to repeat his mistakes. He and Tyler go out to the woods to smoke weed and hang out, in a patch that they call Blood Swamp, which sounds sick as hell until you realize that it basically is just a quiet patch of forest where no one will bother them. It reminded me of being a teenager and accompanying my friends to a place they called “Bong Falls” to smoke some weed. I had imagined a place in the woods–-it was actually an alleyway between two apartment buildings with a leaky pipe, where they broke up weed on a broken sled.
Jill’s story is probably the most tragic out of the three, if only because you watch her slowly slide into tragedy. She’s smarter than her friends Cindy and Kennedy, and with a much stronger survival instinct, but her love for Tyler becomes an anchor on her, dragging her down. It’s her ability to overcome that makes her passages hypnotic, makes you believe she can defy fate. Despite how much loss she experiences throughout the novel—at one point, her childhood home is flattened into a vacant lot—she refuses to give up her hold on life. It’s what makes the inevitability of what happens to her all the more painful. You can see the pieces come together before she does.
Lu’s an outcast, and she uses her outsider status to see people as deeply as she wishes she to be seen. It’s what attracts her to Tyler initially, that he sees how much she knows about the suicides and wants to share that interest with her. The more she sees Tyler—truly sees him—the more apprehensive about him she becomes.
Lu’s voice is a mostly successful experiment in form, and watching her grow from “a robot programmed only to feel sorry for itself,” as Ahmir describes her in an early chapter, to a deeply independent and resilient person is the only morsel of hope in this entire novel. On top of being trans and not yet completely out, Lu is extremely neurodivergent and lives with parents who refuse to understand her. She has her own vocabulary for her feelings. When she’s sad, she goes “all the way wet.” When she feels steady she is “alabaster and lukewarm.” When people are angry they’re “full of knives.” Her emotions have colors and textures, and it takes all her energy to not express them as bodily as she feels them. These passages are often the most lyrical, thrusting the reader into Lu’s mind and asking them to accept her as herself, even if her mind can sometimes be a maze.
I loved the incidental characters who wander in and out of these teenagers’s lives throughout the novel, too. I love Marlon, who works at a shitty pizza place called Pizza Utopia and smokes “pretty okay” weed with Ahmir behind the store. The jovial juggalo who takes an interest in Lu is another stand out. Despite being dumb as a cinderblock, his heart is huge and open, a wild contrast to the strained friendships that Ahmir and Jill experience. Near the end of the book, Ahmir is shocked to discover that Pizza Utopia has closed—the already nearly empty town is even emptier, as if all of Kinsfield is also committing suicide. Ahmir says that it feels like someone dropped a bomb in the middle of town, but Marlon says it’s always been this way.
I feel that way when I visit Connecticut now. It’s not a place I ever enjoyed living in, and as a teenager I tried to escape it in the ways I had available to me: drugs and alcohol. I never got into Oxy, but a lot of my friends did, and over the years it became the only thing they were ever interested in. I remember my friend Billy, who used to bond with me over music, and the way he cut his hair and started wearing oversized clothes so that dealers wouldn’t think he was gay. I remember his girlfriend, Damara, who I used to get drunk with in the mall, who once got kicked out with me in the middle of the night because we had liquor in a water bottle. I remember Matt, who did die, whose house I still don’t like to drive past. I remember kids shooting up in the band room and nodding off. I remember reading a Facebook post warning people about a bad batch of heroin going around, telling people to be careful. Whenever I visit my hometown I feel like I’m surrounded by ghosts, like I can feel them pressing in on me and stealing the air in my lungs.
In my second week of school, literally everyone I had just met at high school got suspended for selling Oxy on school grounds. Billy found the one table in the cafeteria that the cameras couldn’t see, and used to snort Adderall off a textbook there. Once, I sold him a stray Adderall pill that a friend gave me, and he got annoyed because it was extended release—harder to break up all the little beads. Another time, I gave him a few pills of Oxy I found in my kitchen cabinet, and he told me they wouldn’t sell for much because he knew this brand had a weird taste. He still gave me eight bucks for it. Given how much he and his friends loved the drug, I kinda figured I could get more. About a decade ago, my mom saw Billy working at an auto-repair shop. She said he goes by Bill now.
At the end of the first chapter, Ahmir talks about the difference between the legend and the truth. “The myth is clean and sensical because it needs to be,” he says. “The truth is stupid. The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.”
Making sense of this truth and the other truth—that I was kind of a loser, that I didn’t have a lot of friends, that I never did anything harder than smoke weed and drink underage—makes my head hurt. I can see a version of myself, a diverging path I narrowly avoided, that never left Connecticut, followed my high school friends deeper and deeper into their self destruction. I was caught up in the fear that Ahmir described early on, the fear of ruining everything for yourself and everyone else. The fear of my life mattering. The fear of having a destiny. I kept my head above water trying to escape that fear, not knowing how pointless it was to hold onto that. Like Lu says late in the book, “All the world is water. It’s always been. It took me eighteen years to drown.”
Reading Negative Space filled me with love as much as it filled me with sorrow. Ahmir, Jill, Lu, Tyler are all the kinds of people that end up in the dregs of society. They are wastoids, junkies, kids destined to die young, whose funerals are sparsely attended. But even amongst all the pain, they loved, were loved. They held each other. They comforted each other through each new loss. They transformed each other, were transformed. Their lives were not for nothing.
