These shifts in point of view are effective in creating an atmosphere of dread and nausea as the story weaves itself together and tears itself apart simultaneously. 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. an unflinching self-exploration of a woman at various major life stages, not to mention a refreshing portrait of a very modern Irish marriage breakdown, divorce and family break-up. The same goes for the characters of Jill, Ahmir, Tyler and (especially) Lu, who as I said are wonderfully written and characterized.

Three Crows Magazine is a reader-funded publication and your support keeps us operational and independent to continue paying our authors for the best fiction and non-fiction possible. 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. Robert Anton Wilson once said that books reviewed in the NYT are not worth reading and I began to understand why as I've been reading more books from small presses.

Experimenting with the amount of space between lines of type can yield remarkable differences in overall appearance of the page, its readability and how “open” it feels to the reader. The lives of the young people, lives unlived, wasted in the aftertaste of the 60s hippy culture who could afford to waste their lives on their WHORL, – those are the ghosts haunting this place. People in places like these (which I knew a thing or two about) have this sense of stillness they’re ferociously protecting: they don’t want anything to ever change.

The occult practices which begin sprouting with Lu and Arnold remind me of some many things, but the idea of "spirituality" after the fall of civilization. They're all eccentric, beautifully drawn characters, each with sharp, distinct voices and compelling arcs, and Yeager has an absolute mastery over sickeningly lyrical and dense imagery that pushes this nightmarish narrative forward. The constant shifting between perspective and subtle changes in timeline work well to trigger a sense of anxiety and panic in the reader. Sure, there's the surface level stuff - references to Discord and usage of modern slang and references to "The Last of Us" and trap music etcetera, but it probes much deeper than that. struggle so potently, every single day, even when the suicide count racks up and the black strands come to claim us all?

Negative Space – the title invokes drawing lessons from her mother – is partly about allowing her writing to become more personal: or better, more physical. Yeager took a Fisher-eye lens and built an occult myth of degradation and decline that has been sold to the American youth at the cost of their lives. Noma Bar is well-known for his illustrations that use negative space, and the cover he created for Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is no exception. The unique writing vivifies every incident and I don’t think there was a single scene from my first reading that I forgot, but everything on reread STILL took me by surprise and many of it hit even harder than last time.

Overall I think this is just downright the most effective “kids on bikes” small town atmosphere I’ve ever encountered in a horror novel, ESPECIALLY because nothing is sugar coated and as I said in my original review that this dying do-nothing town and all the freaks, stoners, eccentrics and junkies that inhabit it are so tangentially familiar to me. Negative Space tells the story of three teenagers living in the fictional town of Kinsfield, New Hampshire: Jill, Lu and Ahmir. Sometimes it’s a powerful effect that can be used to add narrative and possibly some mystery for the viewer to read into.On the surface he’s the conduit for us to viewing the direct madness of Tyler’s occult obsessions but it illustrates just how damn tragic Ahmir actually is despite being a dickhead who occasionally deserves some measure of scorn.