Negative Space

Negative Space Plot Summary

Introduction

The teenagers of Kinsfield gather beneath the bowling alley's neon glow, their phones raised toward a dangling body. Hector Ferrera sways from an orange extension cord, his bloated face frozen in death's grotesque mask. Flies swarm his soiled pants as vultures spiral overhead, drawn by the scent of decay that seems to permeate everything in this dying New Hampshire town. This is how summer begins for Tyler, Jill, Ahmir, and Lu—four young souls orbiting each other in a place where death has become entertainment and suicide spreads like wildfire. Built on forgotten graves and crumbling mill towns, Kinsfield breathes with its own malevolent rhythm. The mountains press close like prison walls while something ancient stirs beneath the surface, reaching through cracks in reality with thin black strings that connect the living to the dead in ways they cannot yet comprehend.

Chapter 1: The Web of Kinsfield: Suicide Epidemic and First Encounters

The psychiatric ward at Sisters of Hope smells like bleach and broken dreams. Jill meets Tyler here, both confined after their respective breakdowns. He's all sharp edges and bandaged forearms, green eyes that seem to see through everything. The group therapy sessions are led by Todd, a predatory nurse whose smile makes Jill's skin crawl, until Tyler calls him out with casual cruelty that gets him dragged away. But Tyler returns, drawn to Jill like a moth to flame. They bond over shared damage and pharmaceutical cocktails, finding solace in their mutual understanding of pain. When Jill is discharged, she gives Tyler her number scrawled on his bandages. Their first kiss tastes like salt and medication, sealing a pact neither fully understands. Meanwhile, Ahmir Wilson has been Tyler's constant companion since childhood, bound by memories of exploration and first highs. Together they discovered WHORL, a legal synthetic drug that tears holes in perception, revealing networks of black strings that connect all living things. Lu Oliver, the quiet boy who lives in the space between visibility and nonexistence, watches from the margins as these lives intertwine. His parents barely acknowledge him, treating him like an inconvenience to be tolerated rather than loved. The town itself participates in this dance of damage. Kinsfield has seen fifty-seven suicides in the previous year, an epidemic that locals discuss with the casual interest usually reserved for weather reports. The old mica mines in the hills hold secrets, and the abandoned neighborhoods called the Abandonments draw urban explorers and junkies alike to their rotting structures.

Chapter 2: Rituals and Substances: WHORL and the Veil Between Worlds

Tyler introduces Ahmir to WHORL in Blood Swamp behind his mother's duplex. The purple-grey leaves taste like burned bodies and tear reality apart at the seams. Under its influence, Ahmir sees Tyler's face crawling with tiny black strings, millions more stretching down from the sky like puppet wires. The drug doesn't just alter perception—it reveals the hidden architecture that binds all things together. Jill's father forbids her from seeing Tyler, sensing the boy's toxic influence. But teenage love thrives on prohibition, and their secret meetings become more frequent and desperate. Tyler moves between worlds now, sometimes present in his thin body, sometimes absent behind vacant eyes that suggest his consciousness travels elsewhere. At school, the suicide epidemic continues its relentless march. Each death brings crowds of teenagers with phones, documenting the carnage with the detached fascination of naturalists studying insects. They trade photos online, ranking the "best shots" and discussing methodology with clinical precision. Death has become currency in their digital economy of attention. Lu discovers the Forum, an online gathering place where the town's damaged youth congregate to share suicide photos and trade theories about what drives people to self-destruction. Behind usernames like CRAZY BOB and yung_caligula, they dissect their classmates' final moments with mixture of voyeurism and genuine confusion. Some claim to have visions of future deaths, others share cryptic warnings that go unheeded.

Chapter 3: Dark Strings: Tyler's Descent into Occult Practices

The Abandonments call to Tyler like a siren song. He leads Jill and Ahmir through chain-link fences and patrol routes to reach Werner Baumhauer's house—a twisted spiral of architecture where the town's most notorious figure once conducted experiments on the human soul. Inside the attic, Tyler performs his first ritual, cutting his arm and bleeding onto an ancient tree while humming with frequencies that make the air itself vibrate. The ritual works. Something answers Tyler's call, speaking from the darkness with a voice that sends the others fleeing in terror. But Tyler remains, establishing contact with forces that exist in the negative spaces between heartbeats. His notebooks fill with diagrams of circulatory systems and spiral patterns, maps of a geography that exists parallel to the physical world. Jill's father senses the danger growing around his daughter. His attempts to separate her from Tyler only drive their relationship deeper underground, feeding the obsessive intensity that binds them together. Tyler begins living partially in Jill's house, charming her mother with his helpful demeanor while carving occult symbols into door frames and establishing altars in hidden corners. The black strings become visible to those who know how to look. They connect every suicide victim to a vast network of influence that pulses beneath Kinsfield's surface like a secondary nervous system. Tyler learns to read this network, to influence it, to draw power from the deaths that feed it. Each ritual deepens his connection while eroding his humanity.

Chapter 4: Breaking Points: Deaths and Supernatural Manifestations

Halloween brings fourteen suicides in a single night, as if the veil between worlds has grown thin enough for something massive to push through. Bodies hang from apartment windows and bridge railings while others walk into traffic or set themselves ablaze. The notes they leave behind speak of visions and voices, of seeing through time and space to places that should not exist. Tyler's influence over Jill becomes complete when her father dies by hanging in the Abandonments. The official report calls it an accident, but Jill knows better. She's seen Tyler's rituals, felt the power he draws from pain and death. At the funeral, wasps swarm from her father's casket, part of the ecosystem of decay that follows Tyler wherever he goes. With her father gone, Jill's world collapses entirely. Her mother retreats into prescription medications and denial while Tyler moves in permanently, transforming their home into a shrine to his dark practices. Basement walls sprout wasp nests, and Harvey the dog cowers in corners, sensing predators his human family cannot perceive. Lu finds salvation in Arnold Sepulveda, a boy who claims to have died and returned from hell. Arnold teaches Lu protective rituals involving Saint Gobnait, the keeper of bees, showing him how to create barriers of salt and candlelight against forces that hunt in negative space. Their relationship blooms in the shadows, two damaged souls finding comfort in shared madness.

Chapter 5: Scattered Fragments: Living with Loss and Finding New Paths

Tyler's disappearance from the psychiatric hospital marks the beginning of the end. Found naked and dying in Blood Swamp, his body bears rope burns and cuts that speak of otherworldly torture. The thing that returns wearing Tyler's face is hollow, animated by forces that use his form as a convenient vessel for their intentions. Jill flees to college, desperate to escape Kinsfield's gravitational pull. At university, she finds temporary peace with Maddie, a witch whose rituals seem benign compared to Tyler's dark practices. They build altars together and summon dancing rabbits from thin air, exploring magic that heals rather than destroys. But the strings that bind Jill to Tyler cannot be severed by distance. She dreams of him constantly, sees his hollow form drifting through forests like an empty skin bag. When she brings Maddie home to Kinsfield for a visit, the town's malevolence reaches out to claim another victim. Their car crashes into wasps and twisted metal, leaving Maddie broken-necked beside the road. Lu's sanctuary with Arnold crumbles when paranoia and drug addiction consume their relationship. Arnold sees enemies everywhere, convinced that Tyler's influence spreads through anyone who has been touched by Kinsfield's darkness. Lu performs increasingly desperate rituals, trying to protect them both from forces that may exist only in Arnold's fractured mind.

Chapter 6: Beyond the Veil: Final Confrontations with What Remains

Ahmir's criminal partnership with Tyler leads them into drug dealing and violence, trading pills cut with baby aspirin to desperate customers beneath bridges. When Chucky, their psychotic supplier, discovers Tyler has stolen a brick of WHORL, the confrontation destroys what remains of their friendship. Tyler retreats into complete isolation while Ahmir bears the physical consequences of their shared sins. The town continues its death spiral as more businesses close and entire neighborhoods empty out. Those who remain seem hollowed out, moving through their days like sleepwalkers guided by invisible strings. The suicide epidemic has become endemic, part of Kinsfield's natural order rather than an aberration to be cured. Jill returns to the cemetery where she buried Maddie beneath a cigarette-stub candle, establishing a shrine that draws other lost souls seeking answers in the darkness. Local folklore transforms her into the "Candle Girl," a ghost who appears to those who light flames in her honor. The boundary between legend and reality dissolves as easily as the boundary between life and death. Tyler's final transformation is complete when Ahmir finds him hanging from an orange extension cord, his body swollen and fouled like all the others. But death offers no release from the forces that claimed him. His consciousness persists in the network of black strings, influencing events through pure malevolent will even as his physical form rots in the ground.

Chapter 7: Echoes in Negative Space: Aftermath and Continuing Existence

The survivors scatter like radiation from a blast site, carrying Kinsfield's poison into the wider world. Ahmir flees to Washington state, finding work in a call center that notifies families of deaths, his life reduced to delivering tragedy through telephone scripts. The irony is not lost on him—he has become a professional messenger of endings. Lu ages into an old man in Boston, tended by machines in a white hospital room where reality blurs with memory and dream. He speaks to a dot on the wall that may be consciousness, technology, or hallucination, recounting stories of his youth to whatever intelligence chooses to listen. His rituals continue even here, whispered prayers and hidden masturbation that summon fading strings in sterile air. Jill exists in the spaces between spaces, a consciousness untethered from physical form but bound to the landscape that shaped her. She watches over Kinsfield's remaining inhabitants, sometimes appearing to light candles or whisper warnings that go unheeded. Death has not freed her—it has only revealed the true nature of the strings that connect all things. The town itself remains, breathing with the rhythm of accumulated trauma. New teenagers discover WHORL and ancient rituals, drawn to the same dark practices that consumed their predecessors. The cycle continues, will always continue, because some hungers can never be satisfied and some wounds never heal. In Kinsfield, the dead outnumber the living, and their influence grows stronger with each passing year.

Summary

In this vision of American decay, B.R. Yeager crafts a horror that emerges not from monsters or demons, but from the crushing weight of hopelessness that settles over forgotten places. The teenagers of Kinsfield don't choose evil—they are consumed by it, drawn into patterns of self-destruction that feel inevitable as gravity. Their rituals and drug experiments are desperate attempts to find meaning in a world that offers none, to touch something transcendent in the midst of terminal decline. The black strings that connect all things serve as both metaphor and literal truth, representing the invisible networks of influence that bind communities together even as they tear them apart. Each suicide feeds the system, each death strengthens the forces that demand more deaths, until the boundary between cause and effect dissolves entirely. What remains is a meditation on inherited trauma, on the ways that pain passes from generation to generation like a genetic curse, and on the terrible beauty that can be found even in the deepest darkness. In Kinsfield's negative space, between the beats of dying hearts, something vast and hungry waits to be born.

About Author

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B.R. Yeager

Yeager interrogates the boundaries of reality and fiction through a distinctive blend of horror, dystopia, and transgressive fiction. By utilizing themes like youth, trauma, and the effects of loss, Yeager's works delve into psychological and supernatural landscapes. His narratives, such as "Negative Space" and "Pearl Death," employ non-linear and multi-voiced structures that mirror the fragmented psychological states of his characters. While the decaying mill towns and rural settings of New England serve as a backdrop, the author uses surreal and hallucinogenic elements to explore the liminal spaces between life and death.\n\nFor readers drawn to experimental storytelling, Yeager's books offer a rich tapestry of stark imagery and dark humor. His unconventional narrative forms and rotating perspectives challenge conventional storytelling, making his work appealing to those interested in pushing the boundaries of traditional fiction. While his contributions to literature have not been recognized by major awards, his books have found a devoted audience in horror and literary circles. This short bio highlights his unique contribution to the genre, emphasizing his role as an innovator in contemporary fiction.

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