Book Review: Incel

You’re primordial slime, desperately crawling toward the ocean before the sun kills you of thirst. Underneath the glaring heat of a clear sky the surface of a rock is roasting you alive, evaporating the precious moisture clinging to your membranes. The slime next to you—still damp and healthy—was born with a mutant protein that helps it retain water under thermal stress. You weren’t born like that, so your death is a form of progress.

Why?

Because Fuck you, that’s why.

You’re a gazelle, bucking uselessly on the ground, watching your intestines spool out into the jaws of a lion. Your hooves kick the beast in the face, unlocking its fangs from your organs, but it’s too late—the twisted cords of your bowels are already glistening in the grass below. From a distance, another gazelle watches as the pride converges on a single mass of protein, ripping the flesh from your bones. One of the lions takes a bite of your thigh and laughs at the size of your p*nis.

One of the advantages the written word has over any other medium is the ability to get deep into a person’s head, to be able to glimpse the thought processes and worldview that formulates a character’s worldview. This can be both an enlightening experience and deeply unsettling. In Incel by

ARX-Han

, we have both.

The protagonist of Incel is named anon, a graduate student inundated in the mechanisms of evolution and a stiflingly materialistic view of the world and his place in it. He ruminates over the statistics of how many males have been laid by his age in the early twenties and considers his lack of similar success to prove the worthlessness of his genetic material, going as far as deciding he will end himself on his birthday if he fails for yet another year. For Anon, sex is not just a want, but a necessity to prove his worthiness to exist at all.

Within this mindset he shows the reader his botched attempts at garnering female interest, contrasting with Jason, a confident borderline psychopath who gets everything Anon wants with ease. While Anon is deeply stuck in his own head, to the extent all his normal male instincts are sublimated under a mass of theory and ruminations, Jason lives in the moment, attaining sex as thoughtlessly as getting a glass of water. Unfortunately for Anon, when one is a natural, it’s nearly impossible to teach one’s skills. For the truly talented, their talent is in their genes, and conscious thought is unnecessary. It’s simply who they are.

Adding to Anon’s woes is his relationship with his sister, in a way the most tragic part of this story. His sister often has some good thoughts for her brother, whom she has genuine concern for, but is nauseatingly moralizing, scolding, and looking for a fight. Anon doesn’t do himself any favors, senselessly attacking her for a liking a KPop band and other silly arguments. The two siblings being hopelessly lost in their own heads, wanting to be right before anything else at the expense of their relationships, seems to be a family curse.

We watch as his obsession strains his classmates, professor, and starts to creep into impacting his graduation chances. His derision at his Black professor due to the assumption the man merely got his credentials due to his race had the potential to end his academic career, and his conversation with a graduate student about the possibility of figuring out an algorithmic conversation tree that ensured sex brought to light the limits of an understanding of the universe based solely on quantifiable metrics. While there is plenty to learn this way, he fails to understand its limitations.

One gets the idea Anon sees everything through a mechanistic lens simply because that’s the only thing he’s good at. While he does martial arts, he’s only a weak amateur. He has trouble keeping normal relations with people, and his systemization and casual racism seems like a wall to protect himself from everything that doesn’t fit into that strict framework.

It isn’t a coincidence that he gets success, albeit very slow, just by letting go of theory and simply talking to women. As awkward and embarrassing the initial attempts are, slowly he starts to get an intuitive grasp of the game. By the end of the book, while he hasn’t had any great ideological breakthroughs, he at least escapes a part of the maze that led to his hellish existence.

As hard as the themes of this book, a valid question to ask is whether you should read it. I personally enjoyed it, with excellent prose that got the reader into the ideas of Anon, as unpleasant a place as that is. Before reading, I recommend reading the first ten pages, as this gives a good feel of the book and what the author tried to capture. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine.