Lost Boys: Chris McQueer on His Debut Novel Hermit

Chris McQueer’s debut novel Hermit, which came out in February, was released into an unexpected cultural zeitgeist. In the last six years since he started writing his book, incel culture has gone from a fringe topic to something a whole lot more mainstream: the Jack Thorne-penned, Stephen Graham-fronted Netflix drama Adolescence came out; Keir Starmer, in one of his desperate attempts to seem switched on, espoused the need to educate young boys on the dangers of online forums; and a general hum that bordered on mass hysteria filled the air.

Suddenly McQueer, who had been quietly working away on a book about incels – still a relatively fringe topic when he started back in 2018 – found himself being asked about them as some kind of unofficial expert. It was a lot. “I was, at the end of the day, just trying to write an entertaining novel,” he says. Here was a guy who, just a couple of years earlier, was writing funny short stories that he posted online. Promoting the short story collections that had emerged out of them – 2017’s Hings and 2019’s HWFG, both of which cemented McQueer as a slightly surreal, frenetic storyteller – involved answering questions like ‘Where do you get your mad ideas from?’ For Hermit though, which is an altogether more grounded tale, it was: ‘How do we reach these young men? How do we help them? What do we do about toxic masculinity?’ “[And I’m like] fuck, I don’t know,” he laughs.

In actual fact, Hermit didn’t start as a novel about incels (which, for anyone who is chronically offline, is an abbreviation of the term ‘involuntary celibate’; an online movement of disenfranchised guys who have defined themselves by their inability to attract a sexual partner). It was, originally, a story set against the backdrop of the end of the world. Featuring the same two characters – single mum Fiona and her agoraphobic son Jamie – it was their dynamic that he wanted to explore, having himself been raised by a single parent in the East End of Glasgow, where the book is set. His idea was that nuclear fallout had driven them inside, “[but] I got sort of halfway through and I was like, ‘this is shit.’ Like, it just was not working at all,” says McQueer. Other than a background charge of doom, “it didn’t add anything to the story, do you know what I mean? It just felt like a ripoff of [Cormac McCarthy’s] The Road.”

But when the first mainstream news articles started to break about an online community who speak in code, stay indoors and engage in conspiracy in the internet’s dark corners, McQueer saw a new path for Jamie that seemed to fit his disposition and was rooted in the here and now. One that would start McQueer down a bleak and depressing road, as far as research was concerned. “The stuff I was seeing on [forums], it was horrible,” he says. Young men were spending their time systematically breaking down each other’s self-esteem, he explained, while simultaneously coaxing out their generalised rage; galvanising it into a misogynistic worldview. 

With no support network around him and predisposed to catastrophism, Jamie falls down the rabbit hole. We watch a maladjusted young man, who might just need another year or two to grow into himself, go – little by little – beyond the point of no return. The book’s great strength is also what makes it a chilling read: it is deeply humanising. Through the first-person chapters that alternate between his and his long-suffering mother’s point of view, we can see – even if we don’t approve – exactly how Jamie ends up there. And the same is true for Fiona, towards whom any potential judgements about her parenting are allayed by McQueer’s delicate handling of the past abuses she has suffered and their lasting impacts on her confidence. “The book wasn’t written to be nonfiction,” says McQueer. In other words, Hermit isn’t an anthropological study. It may not answer why this kind of thing happens to everyone, but neither does it carry the whiff of detached judgement that a book like this might hold. Instead, in zeroing in on one household, it asks us to empathise, not condemn. 

McQueer may have ditched his first draft of Hermit, in which the end of the world drove his characters to solitude, but what he ended up with was a book in which solitude drives them to want to disappear completely. Hermit is unlikely to be the last book written on incel culture, nor is it likely to be the most comprehensive. But perhaps, in its ability to make us think of someone we know – our neighbour’s son, a cousin, someone we went to school with – it might just prove the most lasting.

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Hermit is out now with Wildfire
Chris McQueer will be appearing at Govanhill International Festival, Glasgow on 9 Aug at 10am