'Hermit' is a book about a young male, Jamie, who is a recluse in his home frightened of leaving his bedroom and with a strained relationship from his mother. He finds solace in his PlayStation and having online conversation with Lee, a friend he has made online but who lives down the road. We also see the perspective of his mother, Fiona, as she struggles with her own identity, past abuse and ability to express love for her son. The book reveals the harmful side of the internet and how young men can be lay predatory to victims of harmful online culture. In particular, incels and misogynistic ‘red pill’ thinking.

The book creates a pit in your stomach that you cannot remove. I, throughout the novel, kept on expecting a good ending to the story, a good turn of events but the novel disregarded any fairytale plotlines. I grew in frustration at the characters as they are unable to change their situations, sometimes by choice but also found that what the book highlighted the most to me was our failing mental health systems. As many times I just dreamt that the characters would go to therapy to figure out their headspace, but it felt as though they couldn’t (something that is an adequate representation to our mental health services in Scotland at the moment).

All the issues exposed in the book felt real and are real. I am morbidly curious about incel culture but it is often hard to understand the male incels prerogative and how someone could think this way. This book acts as an emulation to how people can be entrapped by this hateful thinking. My one issue is that without critically thinking you could disregard the role, while the books events being horrific, that the two young men played within the incel community. Especially that of the friend Lee. I found that the relationship with both their mothers plays an important role in expressing how their attitudes towards women are changing, and without Fiona’s POV this would be less impactful and acts as the reminder of the abhorrent dialogue used by the incels in the novel. I thought this was an interesting way for the author to highlight to the reader to be critical.

This book was an engaging and enlightening novel that I would highly recommend to others to read.

Thank you to #netgalley for this pre-release edition of #hermit. All thoughts are my own.

Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for the ARC in return for my opinions.
I was immediately invested in this story. I was really interested in the premise because I find the whole incel subculture really fascinating to learn about. It was written really well and was quite funny and heartbreaking at times. The humour definitely added to the story and didn’t take anything away in my opinion. There were some dark themes mentioned but I think they were handled well. I just felt awful for all the characters, Jamie in particular I felt I could feel his depression through the page and it was uncomfortable to watch the descent into what happened later. It was one of those books where I HAD to keep reading to know what happened in the next chapter, so I got through it quickly. Really impressed with this, will be recommending to friends.

McQueer writes in a way that’s impossible to ignore. I felt physically sick reading this, especially Jamie’s thoughts and his interactions with Seb. Fiona was also difficult to read, her chapters were a lot more depressing than Jamie’s. The slow but steady progression from confusion to incel on Jamie’s behalf was so uncomfortable. I can easily see how real this is for some men and how easily they slip into this violence and anger. The last 30% of the book made me feel claustrophobic, I knew something terrible and irreversible was going to happen and I didn’t want it to. Truly, a dark and tragic story that is all too familiar to the real life news stories I see day in and day out. A very hard book to read but also written well.