Perspective in ‘The Bee Sting’ & ‘Negative Space’

The most fearsome killer and greatest hope

Doom & Gloom

If my recent posts about the grim but fascinating worlds of The Black Company and The Tyrant Philosophers series – or, you know, real life – has got you down at all, have no fear! These books are so, so much darker.

Content warning right up top for discussion of violence, familial conflict, toxic relationships and suicide. Also, moderate spoiler warning for both novels beginning in the next section. I think Paul Murray's The Bee Sting is worth most readers' time if you have the stomach for tragicomedy, while B.R. Yeager's Negative Space is for a more niche audience looking for cosmic and existential horror. Both are also surprisingly queer!

I certainly found both novels to be gripping and surprisingly rich with meaning – thus this article – but I would struggle to claim that I 100% enjoyed them. As with House of Leaves and The Secret History and Shiva Baby and Tender is the Flesh, I think the authors are conveying other feelings and even experiences through their work. And as with all of those stories, their method in doing so has a lot to do with perspective.

(While I think The Secret History also fits in perfectly with my discussion today, I'm going to leave it for its own eventual article. If you've read it, hopefully you'll see the parallels to Richard's story yourself!)

Covers of The Bee Sting and Negative Space

Structural Perspective

Fundamental to both of these novels is how their stories are told, with a small group of individual, fallible perspectives comprising the reader's entire understanding of the world. The Bee Sting is told by the financially hurting Barnes family: Dickie is the father, Imelda the mother, Cass the daughter and PJ the son. Negative Space is told by three teenagers – Jill, Ahmir and Lu – living in a small town rife with suicides.

Both are also missing key characters' perspectives – the artistic negative space which draws attention and gains meaning by its very absence. In The Bee Sting this is Frank, Dickie's younger brother whom Imelda was supposed to marry. (Arguably also Ryszard, though he's ultimately just a fairly straightforward villain.) In Negative Space this is Tyler, classmate of the other teens and apparent perpetrator of the town's horrors by drug-infused rituals.

I find this structure can very effectively convey the inner lives of characters (e.g. Imelda's sections in The Bee Sting being full stream of consciousness), helping the reader to empathize with their unique human struggles while also telling the story as they experience it. This is at its strongest when those human struggles clash with other other point-of-view characters: giving you both sides of a conflict, asking you to empathize with each and forcing you to watch in horror as they fail to reconcile. Romeo & Juliet, anyone?

Personally, I find it a bit validating to see these characters struggle in the same ways I do. Ahmir and Jill, both craving Tyler's affection, are unaware of each other's pain and of the extent of Tyler's evils. Lu and PJ just want to reach out and connect with Jill and Cass respectively, but the latter pair are too absorbed in their own worlds to even perceive it – let alone empathize with them in any way. Dickie is spiralling faster and deeper than anyone can recognize, and his refusal to communicate means that no one can help him in time.

The Bee Sting's Barnes Family, art by Katty Huertas

Subjective vs. Objective

It's been ten months or so, but we're back here again! I was actually thinking of mentioning KJ Parker in the intro as another author who plays with dark comedy, so it's funny to run into him again now.

Both The Bee Sting and Negative Space are told entirely from subjective – individual, biased – perspectives. Do the events our characters experience have any relation to the objective – factual – reality of their worlds? Absolutely no one can say.

But I think most readers would agree that The Bee Sting envisions a fairly stable and realistic world (Rose's magic notwithstanding), within which the Barnes family (particularly Dickie) are spiralling and struggling to stay in touch with reality. Negative Space, on the other hand, seems to depict layers upon layers of unreality and dream logic.

I want to examine just Dickie and Jill/Ahmir here, as arguably the most poignant examples from each book. I won't quite reveal the ending of either, but will go over many of the stepping stones – so final spoiler warning!

Art by M.K. Cooper / Bearded_Artist_Studios

Dickie's perspective is saved until last in The Bee Sting. From Cass', PJ' and even Imelda's points-of-view, we see him as fairly simple and affable; sure he's apparently sunk the family business, but even that was mostly the recession's fault. Other than one moment where PJ sees Dickie blanche after being stopped by Garda, the main thing we know about him is that he's definitely not his dead brother Frank.

Then we get Dickie's perspective, and we learn that he's gay; that he had a loving partner right up until Frank's death and his shotgun proposal to Imelda. We learn that he's deathly terrified of coming out to his father – doubly so because he's paid €50,000 of the family business' money to Ryszard, who's blackmailing him over an affair the two had. Combined with constant arguments with Imelda and rejected attempts to connect with Cass, Dickie ends up getting really into survivalism in the woods behind the family home.

Suffice to say, events conspire against him. He gets E. coli (and possibly worse) from contaminated well water, seeming to leave him with some kind of brain fog; Ryszard demands more money and begins posting evidence online; he chooses to be laid off rather than come clean; his buddy Victor buys him a gun to hunt grey squirrels, introduces him to conspiracy theories and over time helps to build a sense of imminently looming apocalypse in Dickie.

Regardless of the outcome, hopefully it's clear just how far Dickie's subjective reality – of preparing to face his imminent doom, weapon in hand – is from his objective reality, where he's a single uncomfortable conversation away from living a relatively normal life.

Art by M.K. Cooper / Bearded_Artist_Studios

Part of what makes Negative Space so haunting is how it captures the feeling of growing up in and trying to leave a small, problem-riddled town. (Not that I've had that experience, but I've read my fair share of books about it.) Not just the aforementioned dozens of annual suicides, but also prolific substance abuse, violence and a cutthroat social landscape. Add to that an almost nauseating dose of the 'Adults are Useless' trope and you begin to get the smallest sense of what this book contains.

And I don't know if I can convey much more than that, both because you have to read it and because I read it in one afternoon over a month ago and the details have become a little washed out. But: Teens die and go to hell and return changed. Lu, who is transgender, learns a sacred masturbation ritual to keep her safe from the evils Tyler has reawakened. Both that ritual and Tyler's require a fictional drug called WHORL that consumes the town and leaves it in absolute desolation once supplies run out.

After years of suffering and struggling, Jill and Ahmir manage to leave the town. And their lives outside aren't perfect, but they're as close to a stable, objective reality as this novel gets. They are safe, their trauma is painful but it is behind them, so long as they don't return.

But, like the Overlook presenting Jack with alcohol out of thin air, the town cheats. Ahmir receives a call from his sister begging him to return, which it turns out she didn't place. Jill's new girlfriend pushes and pushes to visit her hometown until she finally relents, having allowed her history there to fade and become numb.

And of course the small town (and alternatively/simultaneously their addictions, their toxic relationships, generational trauma, etc.) immediately lashes onto them; The Bee Sting also very much emphasizes the danger of first Dickie and then Cass returning to their own small town and the foetid whirlpool that is the life they had escaped.

Again, subjective reality fights tooth and nail to bring us out of the illumination and clear air of objective reality. Usually our individual quirks don't lead to us being utterly consumed and led astray, but they can if we're not careful.

Art by M.K. Cooper / Bearded_Artist_Studios

Takeaways

Don't return to your small home town, apparently. But more seriously, be mindful in how you engage with your past and with other people. Everyone has their own subjective crises going on, but by reading books like these I think it becomes easier to be more cognizant and maybe even bridge the gap between us as individuals.

Talk to someone! Preferably not ChatGPT because it's just going to say whatever you want to hear, but even it would probably have steered Dickey, Jill and Ahmir off of their courses.

Read more books. Y'know, I just don't think there's a visual medium that can possibly teach empathy and convey human experiences as well as books do. I lived seven (fairly miserable but complex) lives reading just these two books!

In the end, it's all about perspective. Thanks for reading and until next time <3