Negative Space

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This book transcends feelings too by presenting you with imagery that can make anyone reading it experience synesthesia (Ex. "Arnie slurred his voice all alabaster when he really felt something").

Negative space in art, also referred to as "air space", is the space around and between objects. Instead of focusing on drawing the actual object, for a negative space drawing, the focus is on what's between the objects. For example, if one is drawing a plant, they would draw the space in-between the leaves, not the actual leaves. This technique requires one to forget about a conceptual meaning of an object and forces them to observe through shapes, rather than drawing what they may think an object looks like.A series of three prints, a large white letter R, N, and F are accompanied by a graphic of a little girl, dog, and bus respectively, each illustration creating the defining shape of each letterform. The taglines state: 'You either see the letter or the dog (bus, little girl). Don’t text and drive.'

We go exploring with three main characters – Ahmir, Jill and Lu (who is sometimes Lou, sometimes a he or a she – and nothing about is explained, and neither it should be explained). They barrage the reader with their reality at the intensity of a cover bombing. The trio goes to the same school and is bound with the fourth character – Tyler. Jill and Tyler Ahmir and Tyler are friends, Jill dates Tyler, despite her parents’ displeasure, and Lu is forced to know Tyler because her other two friends know him. This is a difficult book to review because I loved it but I'm having a hard time putting my thoughts and feelings into words. Instead I'm going to make a list of keywords to get you in the mood: drugs, suicide, internet forums, nihilism, existentialism, dreams, nightmares, metaphysics, rituals... are you interested yet?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. Near the end Jill muses about how state lines are arbitrary, that it’s all really the same thing copy and pasted forever, and jfc if that doesn’t speak volumes about capitalism itself and the cycle the youth of today grow up within, the one where we are all aware of as the abyss of the future awaits us like a void in space and can do nothing but fight against this entropy through some kind of broad radical action, whether personal, empathetic and based on identity (Lu) or self-centered, desiring to escape that entropy all together through trying to achieve some spiritual apotheosis (Tyler), etc. I’ll reiterate that I still think this is probably the best fictional portrayal of misspent alienated youth I have ever seen, which is impressive especially considering how this was written in 2020 and those tropes have long been utilized throughout the decades, centuries; Yeager’s just feels so distinctly generational and urgent in a way I’ve never seen it done before 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. FAQ: 'Ma' and 'Mu' - Japanese Gardens Forum - GardenWeb". Forums.gardenweb.com . Retrieved 2009-11-11.