Misogynistic, murderous and... sympathetic? Welcome to the incel age of fiction
Once confined to a dark, dusty corner of the internet, incels are becoming increasingly mainstream as harrowing news stories about murder sprees and manifestos shine a light on a disturbing, sometimes violent, movement. These days, it is proving fertile ground for fiction writers whose...
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Welcome to the incel age of fiction: misogynistic, murderous and... sympathetic?
Once confined to a dark, dusty corner of the internet, incels are becoming increasingly mainstream as harrowing news stories about murder sprees and manifestos shine a light on a disturbing, sometimes violent, movement. These days, it is proving fertile ground for fiction writers whose protagonists are denied sex and lash out as a result. Nick Duerden dives deep into this latest literary trend and finds something more human than expected
Sunday 16 February 2025 06:00 GMT
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Vexed virgins: incel stories are emerging as a trend in literature as new writers find inspiration in a shadowy subculture (Getty)
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Jamie Skelton doesn’t get out much. Since dropping out of school three years ago with no qualifications, he sleeps through the days, rising at night to play video games. Jamie, who lives in Glasgow, has no friends. His only human interactions are with his mother, and with Lee, an online pal with whom he plays games and exchanges chat. The prospect of a girlfriend is unlikely, and not just because he hasn’t left the house in months. The outside world feels, to him, increasingly alienating, and so he stays indoors, subsisting on a diet of junk food. The future looks bleak. It is Lee who one day identifies what they are.
“Here, eh, by the way, I hink we’re incels,” he tells him in broad Glaswegian.
Jamie has no idea what he is talking about. “Wit?”
“Incels. Involuntary celibates.”
Jamie remains none the wiser. “Yer gonnae have tae explain that tae me.”
The Oxford English dictionary defines an incel as a man who is involuntarily celibate: “a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually” and who “are typically associated with views that are hostile towards women”.
There are some – but by no means all – incels who seem intent on exacting revenge on a world indifferent to their existence. In 2018, Alek Minassian drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto, killing 10 and injuring 16, the majority of them women. Minutes before the attack, he posted on Facebook: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! … All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” calling back to another self-described incel who killed six people in 2014. After Minassian was found guilty, people from his community sprang to his defence; one commenter suggested that his act was “a middle finger to this hostile society”.
Until recently, incels were a subject most successfully dissected in non-fiction – in Men Who Hate Women, for example, the 2018 book by the writer Laura Bates – and within think tank reports, like the one from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in 2023 that tellingly concluded: “Those who study and understand incel communities and ideologies must continue to advocate for a nuanced portrayal in public discourse, media and policy.”
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Traffic to websites promoting ‘incel’ culture has increased six times over during 2021 (PA Wire)
However, the topic is also now proving fertile ground for fiction writers. The aforementioned Jamie Skelton, 19, is the protagonist of Hermit, the debut novel from 34-year-old Scottish writer Chris McQueer, which fellow Scottish writer John Niven has called “an utter triumph, far and away the best debut I've read in a very long time”. If non-fiction examines incels from a safe distance, observing them as one might bacteria under a microscope, then McQueer takes the bold decision to get under the skin of one – not to moralise or condemn, but simply to witness life through his lens.
“I wished I could be like the people I’d see at school who seemed to be pals with everybody,” Jamie says. “The lassies just sort of sneer at me if I ever accidentally make eye contact. And fair enough, I’ve never been the best looking or the coolest. I’ve got horrible teeth, man. And a big nose. Even the teachers seem to have it in for me.”
In pursuit of companionship, Jamie begins to research incels – this potential band of brothers to whom he is somehow connected, and in whose company he might find comfort. But, he says, “I click on images to see some examples, and they all look like me. Skinny, spotty, shite haircuts, bad clothes. I click off because it’s gave me a mad sick feeling in my belly.”
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If non-fiction examines incels from a safe distance, observing them as one might bacteria under a microscope, then Chris McQueer takes the bold decision to get under the skin of one in his debut novel (Hachette UK)
By dint of his agoraphobia, Jamie is only really a threat to himself. But this changes when he and Lee travel down to London to meet up with an incel they meet online, Seb. Requiring proof of their allegiance, Seb puts Jamie and Lee through an initiation process. First, he tells them, they are to follow random women on the streets simply to unnerve them. Bonus points if she cries. Next, they have to target one particular woman and throw acid in her face.
“It won’t kill her, it’ll just leave her with some burns, some scars,” Seb tells them. “Then she’ll get to see what life is like when no one wants to look at you. She’ll get to see what it’s like to be like us.”
Throughout everything that happens next, Hermit dares the reader to look away. Hermit’s success is predicated on the fact that its author refuses to pull punches. Jamie is sad and somewhat pathetic, but he is also fully human, with emotions like the rest of us. Life has been cruel, and this causes him pain. It is unpleasant reading, but vital.
McQueer first came across incels in online forums and became, he says today, “morbidly curious about them. So many spoke of their experiences with learning difficulties, neurodivergence, abuse and poverty. They’re easy prey for manipulative, dangerous, and hateful guys on there – of which there are many.”
About a decade ago, a new word began to filter into the English language: hikikomori. It’s a Japanese term that means “social withdrawal from society” and was adopted, as a noun, to label oneself. Hikikomori thrived online among like-minded souls who played Minecraft and communicated in chat rooms, and whose numbers blossomed across Asia where, so it was reported in articles at the time, they were enabled by overprotective parents. The global pandemic then played into this collective paranoia.
It would be a stretch to suggest that hikikomori were leading happy, healthy lives, but they were not, by and large, considered dangerous. In fact, it was when similar demographics began to be identified across America and Europe that it became apparent some were angry. They don’t like their incarceration, or not fitting in. They want to lash out.
There have been several incidents like those in Toronto, and a number of acid attacks. A trial in Edinburgh in 2020 revolved around a man accused of researching mass killings linked to incels; it shone a light on “an online subculture which endorses violence towards attractive women”, said the BBC. The court heard that “incel men believe they are at the bottom grouping of society and that physically attractive women are at the top”.
Problematic men have always been fair game for writers, of course, books a welcoming place for waifs and strays, and myriad malcontents. After all, what is fiction if not holding up a mirror to the world?
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In February, the Asian-American author Tony Tulathimutte published his novel ‘Rejection’, described as ‘the first great incel novel’ (Harper Collins UK)
Stephen King has salted many of his horror stories with loner types whose dissatisfaction likely stems from a woman’s spurning, like Harold Lauder in 1978’s The Stand, a teen outcast who experiences increasing resentment to those around him as they couple up. John Kennedy Toole’s raucous 1980 novel A Confederacy of Dunces features an altogether hideous lead character, one Ignatius J Reilly, an indolent man of 30 who still lives at home with his mother. He burps and masturbates, can’t hold down a job and can’t find love. Not quite an incel, perhaps, but not a fully functioning member of society either.
Elsewhere, there is the age-old discussion that Holden Caulfield, the hero of JD Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in The Rye, was an early forerunner himself – someone who is described on a Reddit discussion of incels in literature as a young man who “literally just talks about how he hates everyone and everything all the time”.
Earlier this year, the American-Asian author Tony Tulathimutte published his novel Rejection, described by Vulture as “the first great incel novel”. Tulathimutte’s focus is the sexually dissatisfied, and Rejection dares to play this theme for laughs via a series of interconnected stories that fan out like a particularly gruesome flower. Here, characters are summarily denied sex, while their struggles with self-hatred and shame engender an increasing sense of nihilism. If nothing goes your way, and everything is denied to you, how would your worldview not become corrupted?
Tulathimutte’s story is somewhat politically and morally ambiguous – arguably encouraging the reader to sympathise with a murderous, misogynistic man at a time when they are seemingly rife in real life. Some people labelled Tulathimutte as an incel apologist. On whether readers are supposed to sympathise with his problematic protagonist, he demurred, telling The Guardian: “I want to be able to complicate any sort of reading that would reduce my work to something banal or ideological.”
One writer who certainly does not care about how he or his writing is perceived ethically is Michel Houellebecq. The self-styled enfant terrible of French letters was one of the early identifiers of this current literary trend – which is to say, books about sexually frustrated men who gradually tip towards anger.
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Recent reappraisal of controversial novelist Michel Houellebecq’s incendiary work has seen him connected to the incel movement of today (AFP/Getty)
His debut novel, 1994’s Whatever, follows a computer programmer and chain-smoker who tries to convince his colleague, a man who has never had sex, to murder a young woman who rejected him. His follow-up novel, 1998’s Atomised, published when he was in his early forties, revolves around two brothers, one unable to form meaningful human relationships of any kind, the other who seeks sexual gratification in brothels, but rarely attains any lasting satisfaction.
Atomised was hailed an instant cult classic, while recent reappraisal has seen it proclaimed “the ultimate incel novel”. A subjective compliment, clearly. Houellebecq, never a writer known for his subtlety, stumbled towards only one conclusion in Atomised: that society is broken. What else to embrace, then, but misanthropy?
We choose to read in the first place to better understand those around us, and to generate within us a greater sense of empathy. In Hermit, Chris McQueer does a fine job of bringing his complicated character to messy life. Acid attacks, Jamie decides, are “a vile and cowardly thing”, but he can’t quite alight upon an alternative path.
The point of McQueer’s book is not to judge Jamie – or to humanise him, but simply to walk in his shoes for a while, however ill-fitting they are. “To me, [the surge in incels] shows that the cuts to mental health services in this country and beyond are having really devastating effects on young people,” McQueer says. “It also shows, I think, that men need to be doing a lot more to combat this. We need to talk to the boys and young men in our lives, encourage them towards healthier hobbies and interests, lift them up, encourage them, challenge their views and be good role models.”
While Houellebecq remains convinced that we are all of us beyond salvation, McQueer is striving for greater understanding. Hermit reaches no happy ending as such, but through compassion – and the offer of a very British climactic cup of tea – he does offer the glimmer of light at the end of a distant tunnel. Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect any more than that.
‘Hermit’ by Chris McQueer is published by Wildfire on 27 February
