Hermit by Chris McQueer

Hermit is a novel about a guy who can barely leave the house, but whose attempts to get away from his mum’s nagging might take him much further than he thought. Jamie is nineteen and since he dropped out of school three years ago, he just stays in his room playing games and watching YouTube videos with his online friend Lee, occasionally venturing downstairs for microwave burgers and fries, and chocolate spread. His mum Fiona despairs, but she also struggles to connect with other people, especially after kicking out her abusive husband. When Lee tells Jamie about a new friend, who says they are both incels and should come down to London to stay with him, it seems like an escape, but it isn’t as simple as that.

Having enjoyed Chris McQueer’s short stories, I would’ve wanted to read this one regardless of the content, but the blurb drew me in too, with the idea of exploring online and incel culture through the perspective of someone who might be targeted by incels online as a potential ‘convert’. McQueer treats it all with nuance, through chapters that alternate between Jamie and Fiona’s perspectives to compare how their similarities led them in different directions, and particularly how online incel and “manosphere” culture preys on people who don’t even feel that connected to its key tenets and claims. Jamie doesn’t care that much about girls until he is told he should be angry at all women for rejecting him, and you see how that makes him lash out at his mum and believe she doesn’t care about him.

There’s an underlying dread that particularly sets in halfway through, as Jamie and Lee go to London, and you know something isn’t going to go well. It’s darkly ridiculous, but also feels horrifyingly real, especially if you know anything about incels or other online communities (for example, the elements in which Jamie didn’t understand the terminology or ideas of incels, but felt like he had to go along with it). Fiona’s story is also moving, not just how she cannot help Jamie or even feel able to tell him that she loves him, but also how she basically had a similar trajectory that was different due to it being a earlier time and her being a woman (and the element where people on Facebook accused her of killing Jamie was darkly real too).

From McQueer’s short stories, I was expecting something maybe surreal alongside the darkly funny elements, but Hermit is actually more of a deep look at feeling like an outsider and the impact these days of certain online communities finding prey in these people, with more dread and sadness than weird elements. It is refreshing to read a literary fiction novel that takes this kind of thing seriously, rather than just having some reclusive incel character as a joke. McQueer makes this a moving look at two people, mother and son, who could be described as hermits, with plenty of humour but not treating them as a joke.