[INTERVIEW] B.R. YEAGER'S CATALOGUE INDUCES IMMERSION • DIS/MEMBER

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You spend so much time writing a book, sometimes you have to break it a little to keep it alive.

Insidious. Corrupt. Harrowing. Funny? These and many other adjectives have been applied to horror author B.R. Yeager’s body of work, approvingly and eagerly, by reviewers and audiences hungry for the transgressive, the challenging. Deploying both form and content to the hilt, the results are post-post-postmodern, experiments in the human psyche’s darkest recesses delivered by a serious prose stylist. Fans of Lars von Trier and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Joe Koch, Starkweather, and Junji Ito, take note. Yeager’s most recent book, 2023’s collection Burn You the Fuck Alive, winds up one punch with its title and delivers more in quick succession.

Each story, illustration, and fragment exposes violence of unsettling familiarity threaded through with aching humanity–the witch’s brew necessary for any horror story to land. For readers coming to Burn You straight from 2020’s novel Negative Space, some of the former’s contents might feel outside such an author’s interest. Yet so-called pandemic fiction (“Young People”) and seemingly-straightforward ghost stories (“The Buried Man”) find their place alongside formally bizarre elements like “In the Shadow of Penis House” (yes, really) and “The Autocastrato.” It’s in the familiar–an urban legend, a struggling couple, a power-drunk nurse, a film set–that the cracks start to appear. Likewise, it’s the interstices–single-line stories, murky photo art–that shade in vast gray areas of the reader’s imagination and morality.

Haters of second-person narration, look elsewhere for your thrills! The title’s You abounds: you experience a burst appendix; you are marooned in a mansion of decay, your body disappears. Crescendos of violence are matched by other bodily concerns; throughout Burn You is seeded a threatening heterosexuality, heightened by marriages of orgasm and trauma, couples’ affections spurred by kidnapping and torture, or fake blood mimicking real murder.

Yet Burn You and Negative Space are both leavened by humane details–leavened in the true sense, not of a thing lightened but a thing brought to its true and final form. Horror’s needle to be threaded is plausibility; even the most outre scenarios require some crucial positioning of the audience in the driver’s seat. Negative Space achieves this by exploding intense, subjective familiarity into a myriad smoking fragments. Perhaps not all of us have been to western Massachusetts, but many of us are from or live in depressed towns. Perhaps not all of us grew up in the nascent social Internet, but most of us now experience its rotting aftermath.

Negative Space takes the freshly-tropified Stranger Things formula (a doughty troupe of nerd youth descend into their town’s dark underbelly) and sets it spinning. Weird drugs, occult rituals, suicide epidemics, self-harm, black-belt co-dependence, fringe music, gender fluidity, post-industrial towns: Negative Space is a kaleidoscope of things Americans fear most. But within the abrasive content, challenging multi-perspective format, and bleak conclusions are characters who speak to readers (10,000 copies sold is no slouch for a small indie press) and bracing, beautiful writing.

A Yeager book is less an item to read than an experience to inhabit, often so anxiety-inducing that grounding is required afterward. They’re perhaps not for everyone, but their presence in the horror media ecosystem bodes well for its health. In a time of endless reboots, prequels, and adaptations, bot-generated art and movies blanket-bombed for tax write-offs, independent sensibilities are at a premium. In a pandemic world, a warring world, it’s tempting to reach for a comfort read. What might be most needed now is the comfort of connection through shared ambitions to interrogate or create, through mutual belief in our art, our vision. My writing might never sit on the same bookstore display as Yeager’s, but I trust in our common desire to write anything at all.

Below, read B.R. Yeager’s thoughts on the place of technology in horror, twisted text formats, and what’s coming up next for him!

Dee Holloway: Hello, B.R., and welcome to DIS/MEMBER! To start, could you give us a background sketch of you and your work so far?

B.R. Yeager: I’m just an author based out of Western Massachusetts. Since 2017 I’ve published three books, Amygdalatropolis through Schism[2], and Negative Space and Burn You the Fuck Alive through Apocalypse Party. I also wrote and designed Pearl Death, a deck of cards that functions as a non-linear history of a dead civilization told through item descriptions. That was published as a limited edition of 160 through Inside the Castle, and has been sold out since 2020 – though a PDF of the cards is available through their digital library.

DH: Your body of work is quite literally that: a selection of the written word shaped differently for each venture. Novels, short fiction, classical Internet fora, card games–can you speak on the relationship of the story’s form to its content and themes?

B.R.: I’m just trying to keep myself from becoming bored with a project. I’m fighting stagnation. You spend so much time writing a book, sometimes you have to break it a little to keep it alive. Messing with form can also be a good way to show and not tell – like, with Negative Space, the alternating perspectives lets readers pick up on inconsistencies between viewpoints, rather than me directly bringing those inconsistencies to their attention. Or thinking about the nested forums and imageboards and texts within my books – these are attempts at inducing immersion, so that the reader experiences what the characters experience, so that they can go through the same process of interpreting and reaching a conclusion that the character is. I’m constantly trying to figure out ways of bringing a reader into a narrative without telling them how to feel or how to interpret it. By messing with form, by being a bit jarring, you can bring a reader’s attention to something without telling them specifically what they should be looking for.

DH: As a thirty-something, it’s been interesting to watch my generation begin to dominate the cultural niches I’m interested in. Authors like E.J. LaRocca, Kyle Muntz, and you have brought certain formative turn-of-the-millennium experiences into horror, and in particular utilized the Internet and online spaces and realities beyond straightforward signifiers of the tech timeline. What is the Internet to you? What’s the divergence point between Negative Space and, say, Black Mirror?

B.R.: It’s interesting (or maybe not) – when I first started out I found the internet extremely inspiring, but these days I’m barely interested in it at all. I can’t really put my finger on why – maybe burnout from plumbing the topic, or maybe the consolidation of the internet has just made it a much less interesting space. Maybe it’s the fact that everyone is scrambling for money and fame now, everyone’s tuning their personalities and content toward algorithms, and the internet has become more impersonal and less strange as a result. It just doesn’t scratch the itch for me anymore. I’d say the major difference between Negative Space and something like Black Mirror is that the technology isn’t the focal point, it’s just another mode of storytelling, and a way of placing the reader within the experience of the characters. But there’s also a formal influence at work. Most media about the internet doesn’t reflect the internet’s form, which is strange to me, because there’s a wealth you can hijack from it. The fast-paced clip of internet communication and social media greatly inspired Negative Space’s format – short, easily ingestible bursts of narrative alternating between multiple voices. I think I was trying to answer that question of “why is it so easy to endlessly scroll Twitter but sitting down with a book and reading an equivalent amount of text feels like labor?” I love books and I love reading but my attention span is embarrassingly shot these days. I think I was hoping to appeal to readers who are in a similar position.

There’s a great interview I bring up a lot – it’s with one of the lead designers of Disco Elysium. And essentially he explains the how and why of the game’s user interface, and how the team used Twitter as inspiration for how the game displays text. The way Twitter squeezes vast amounts of short, punchy text into a narrow column constantly scrolling upward, as well as the way that Twitter encourages hyper-aggressive communication – a bunch of those aspects ended up being synthesized within the game. So I think I was taking a similar approach with Negative Space and Amygdalatropolis – how do I replicate the ease and addictiveness of scrolling within the form of a novel?

DH: I live in upstate New York and have family in New Hampshire, so many of the locales in your books are familiar to me, or feel similar to my own town. What is it about western Mass that drives your fiction? Do you always choose the setting consciously, or does it emerge from the story as it’s being written?

B.R.: Honestly, it all comes down to familiarity. I want my stories to have a strong sense of place, and the only way I can really accomplish that is by writing about a place I’m deeply familiar with. I’ve always lived in Massachusetts, so by extension almost all my stuff is set in New England. There are a couple times I’ve set stories outside of here, but for those I was heavily coached by people who do live in those regions, who provided input on flora, lingo, architecture, etc. But even then I’m constantly worried that I missed something, that I got certain details wrong, that I’m giving away that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And hell, even with my New England stories, I’ll still get details wrong. I’m not sure how much anyone else actually cares, but it drives me crazy.

DH: A major element throughout your work is the occult: not Church of Satan aesthetic trappings, but an interest in and–it seems–knowledge of the subterranean, especially music, ritual, and meaning-making. How do you perceive the occult in our current era? How do occult works continue or change in an environment of constant surveillance, including self-surveillance?

B.R.: I’m undisciplined, a scatterbrain, and a dilettante, so I should never be mistaken for an authority on the occult. But it is something that interests me, and I talk about it frequently with friends who are much smarter and knowledgeable in that arena (as well as others). As human beings, we are inherently limited by both our senses and our ability to translate those senses into information. That information is then interpreted by our consciousness based on prior knowledge, experiences and predilections. Even when using technologies that can sense things we biologically cannot, our limitations are built into not only those technologies but our interpretations of the information produced. So essentially my interpretation of the occult is that it is a process of engaging with what is beyond our understanding, or conducting a practice that engages with the unperceivable. This is a bit basic (but again, I am a bit basic), but I think Edwin Abbott’s Flatland is a good primer on the concept, in that there is a dimension we are biologically equipped to perceive, that we recognize as reality, yet there are additional dimensions that are just as real, that we also inhabit, but are unable to perceive or understand. Just because we cannot perceive these dimensions does not mean that they do not impact us, or that we do not impact them. This is what I consider “the divine.”

DH: Burn You the Fuck Alive lives up to its title and then some, in terms of intensity, anxiety, and violence. At the same time, it contains erotic scenes, noirish bits, and other elements that committed Yeagerheads may or may not have expected. Would you say it’s part of anti-horror? What are some tendencies in contemporary horror fiction (or other media) that you feel are expanding the umbrella in interesting ways?

B.R.: Interesting – I wasn’t familiar with the term “anti-horror.” It feels a bit deconstructionist, and I don’t think that’s something I’m intentionally going for with my work, in that I’m not specifically trying to subvert the wider horror genre, or make a comment on horror or anything like that. Nothing wrong with that, but I think my aim is different. Ultimately, I’m trying to communicate something about lived experience and human perception, and the form is a result of that goal, rather than a comment on the form itself. That said, there’ve been plenty of people who’ve responded to my work with “iT iSn’T eVeN hOrRoR” because it doesn’t conform to X, Y or Z, so I can understand why it might be perceived as a subversion or deconstruction, though I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about here.

I’m going to try and answer your question in a roundabout way, because it’s easier for me to talk about what is not expanding the richness of horror fiction today (in part because I am in no way an authority on the wider world of horror fiction, but also because I think horror has already been expanded grandly, long before I or my contemporaries arrived on the scene). I chalk up the “is it or is it not horror” conversation to the overall tropification of narrative art, which has frankly been disastrous to the creation, sharing, and discussion of art. I’m admittedly an outsider, but it sounds like this phenomenon is worst in the romance genre. Good God. I’ll see people listing the characteristics that, in their mind, need to be present for a book to be considered “romance” – like, if it doesn’t have a happy ending it can’t be considered a romance novel – and that’s just absurd to me. Genre should only ever be a playground, never a prison. I think the only way of expanding any genre is by approaching it from a genuine desire for discovery and play. Banish the concept of tropes. Hell, don’t even try to conform to any specific genre – just see where your story lands organically. “Write to market” is a cancer on art; possibly the worst creative advice anyone has ever given, and it’s prescribed so frequently by people who excel at pretending they’re authorities on the matter. It’s a terrible trap for beginning writers, and I can’t imagine how much it has tripped people up. Instead, write to your passion. So long as you’re genuine, people will recognize it and come along for the ride.

DH: What have you been listening to lately?

B.R.: I’ve been a bit obsessed with the new ScHoolboy Q – it feels like a high watermark and will likely be seen as classic in the coming years. Really synthesizes everything he’s previously done into an immensely coherent and visionary work. Have also been into the Kommodus record that dropped last year, Wreath of Bleeding Snowfall. Like the ScHoolboy Q, it’s big and strange and visionary. Has provided lots of great winter listening. Finally, ambient dub has been my writing soundtrack this past year – Andrew Nolan’s Radiophonic Dub, as well as his collab with God is War, are excellent to write to, as is Vladislav Delay’s Whistleblower, as is the entire Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement discography. This stuff just puts me in the correct headspace to create and flips a switch that keeps me inspired and motivated.

DH: What’s on deck for your next project?

B.R.: I’m about 40,000 words into a draft of the next novel – it’s all still a mess and far away from the finish line. Hoping to have it completed in two or three years. It isn’t horror.

Many thanks to B.R. for this feast for thought! Whatever this writer has up next, we’ll be hover-handing the pre-order button. Burn You the Fuck Alive and other books are available right now through the author’s website and your favorite independent bookstore. Happy reading, ghouls!