On this episode, I speak to novelist and cult literary icon ARX-Han. Han is the author of Incel: A Novel, published in 2024 — a searing, existentially bleak portrait of a young man alienated from society, and at war with himself.
The novel made a huge impression on me, bringing to mind the vivid prose and themes of early Brett Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuik, the nihilistic novels of Michel Houellebecq, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. It’s an important and powerful debut from an incredible author, which is why I chose to write about it in my new book, Crisis Masculinity.
On his blog Decentralized Fiction, ARX-Han shares literary analysis, reviews and essays, often focusing on what he calls ‘Androgenic fiction’ — stories about men, their lives and beliefs, and the cultures they move in. We talked about incel ideology, the current state of publishing, and the vanishing subject of male interiority in fiction.
This episode is available as a video version at the bottom of this post, but with a static image for the guest. ARX-Han is a pen name, and the author chooses to keep his identity a closely-guarded secret. For that reason, you’ll hear his words through a voice changer. I’ve added captions to the video, and you can read or download the transcript here. To stay up to date with video episodes, subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube.
Reading recommendations from ARX-Han
We start by talking about the genesis of Incel: A Novel, and the way it blends satire with a bleak depiction of the main character’s inner voice and thoughts. This tonal balance, and the tight first-person focus of the text certainly nod to some of ARX-Han’s literary influences, particularly Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and Less Than Zero. Unlike these novels, the protagonist is not the scion of a wealthy family — he is more akin to the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. A young man disillusioned by and disconnected from society, and bonds of friendship, he spends his time masturbating, dreaming of violence, and attempting (without much success) to get laid.
This is a very believable and not unsympathetic portrait of what William Deresiewicz called “unfuckable hate nerds”, as this quote from his piece for Tablet Magazine describes:
What does it feel like to be a young man? It feels like you are Kafka’s cockroach, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. It feels like you were drawn by Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb. You are an Untermensch, a particle, a stew of envies and resentments, a festering sore. You look, from below, at the happy and lovely and rich. You creep, alone, along a wall. You masturbate as if your life depended on it.
ARX-Han calls the character’s mindset and worldview “scientistic nihilism”, the reduction of human relationships and desire into measurable, quantifiable categories, as mapped in the incel’s belief in a hierarchy of “chads” or “alphas” (high-status males who attract women easily) and “anons” and “betas” (involuntary celibates, cut off from society and therefore the opportunity to have sex).
This also describes the primacy that the incel framework assigns to the act of having sex, as opposed to the goal of establishing a meaningful relationship with a woman. His term defines the way in which these young men are influenced by the algorithm, where popularity, relevance and status are distributed to those influencers with the most transgressive messaging, such as Andrew Tate. It is a system with fixed inputs and outputs, where transforming oneself from an ugly, unlovable “beta” to a desired and successful “alpha” can be achieved through the use of pick-up artists techniques like “negging”, or the transformation of the face and body through drastic means, as “looksmaxxing” influencers like Clavicular promise. Here’s a Guardian article from this year that gives a primer on Clavicular, for those who haven’t encountered his particular brand of borderline-psychotic “influence” yet.
The term also describes the effects of a dating pool defined by algorithms through the use of apps, which as ARX-Han describes, flattens the human experience of romantic connection into a menu system, where sex or companionship can be “ordered in” with a few button clicks. Like social media more generally, ARX-Han believes this represents a totalising “metricisation” of desire, reducing what should be the most meaningful of experiences to a leaderboard with winners, losers and rejects vying for position in a digital status hierarchy. All of these trends are examined in the novel, and in our discussion — for me the key to understanding this is that it reduces everything to a zero-sum “competition,” the foundational mechanism of capitalist commodification, which as ARX-Han says, presumes that everything is a “marketplace” where “value” is determined through status games.
In an essay on his blog, ARX-Han defines this condition as “hyperliquidity”:
I can feel the speed of cultural evolution is accelerating because social media has radically increased memetic liquidity; that is to say, it’s made the transmission of social norms and behaviours hyperliquid. One has the sense that Zoomers are in a state of continuous cultural anxiety because there is no social superstructure that can confer a sense of stability… Hyperliquidity is a property of the modern app-based dating market where attractive people can effectively order other human beings like commodities in a way that fundamentally degrades the human condition.
In his view, this has ushered in a “post-romantic” era, where humans behave not like beings with agency, but as “biological computers” which respond to data-driven inputs. He connects this to evolutionary psychology, an influential but much-criticised approach to determining human behaviour, which goes back to the ideas of (among others) Charles Darwin and E.O. Wilson, the latter of whom wrote one of the core texts, Sociobiology in 1975. Wilson's work was criticised by Stephen Jay Gould and others for flirting with eugenic concepts of biological determinism and “race science.”
We go on to talk about the incel as “the quintessential literary subject” sitting at the intersection of several cultural “gigatrends”. The first is alienation, driven by technology and changes to social organisation. The second is automation and industrialisation, which affect the subject’s self-esteem by making them economically unviable (or at least precarious).
Another trend is the “metricisation” mentioned earlier, by which all human activity can be measured, predicted, and then monetised. Finally, he mentions secularisation — the erosion of all traditional spiritual systems in favour of a scientific, materialist view; driving cultural fissures, and provoking a crisis of meaning, whether we are aware of it or not. For ARX-Han, these trends drive the creation of a “permanent underclass” of (specifically male) people, who are — or who feel — that they are no longer economically, socially or spiritually necessary in society.
Next we discuss the term “androgenic literature” — novels written from the perspective of a male character, or that focus specifically on male interiority. I allude to Naomi Kanakia’s excellent analysis of literary trends, where the male protagonist — especially those with an “unlikable” tendency to express their pain and anguish — are no longer considered viable or marketable, by either publishers or readers. Kanakia writes:
… the central problem of the white male writer is that you’re raised with some mythology of yourself as a powerful person, but at some point you realize you’re actually weak and impotent. Yet you’re in a culture where in order to succeed, both professionally and personally, you need to project power. So you end up feeling weak and insecure. White male writers would like to convey this struggle in fiction, but… fiction is subject to the same problem. Female readers are repelled by men who seem pathetic, and if your protagonist is too self-loathing or weak, then women won’t want to read them.
ARX-Han mentions Tucker Max and Chad Kultgen as examples of “crass” androgenic literature, noteworthy for their work’s extremism and blunt portrayal of male American norms and characters. He goes on to underline the importance of “voice” in fiction, and speculates on why this has become an undervalued commodity in fiction markets. Because novels like those by Max and Kultgen are harder to find these days, the term “androgenic” itself can be read as an “extremist” position; people imagine androgenic novels will focus solely on problematic or extreme male characters.
For ARX-Han, it is correct to observe that characters and experiences like this can be part of androgenic texts, but it is not what defines them. He mentions Dryback by Juan Ecchi as a poignant portrait of the interior life of an ageing millennial as a good example of androgenic fiction which does not focus on a mass shooter, killer, or abusive male character. He also offers a rare exception to the contempt the publishing industry has for androgenic fiction, in the form of Flesh, David Szalay’s Booker-prize winning novel about the life and troubles of a Hungarian immigrant to the UK. Read a short interview with Szalay by Nic Marna here, and a longer profile at The Guardian here.
I mention Daniel Falatko’s excellent debut The Wayback Machine as another example of beautifully-depicted male interiority, and a book that the mainstream publishing industry would have jumped at in the late nineties and early 2000s. We contrast this with the popularity of autofiction, with its tendency towards self-mythologization and diaristic prose. ARX-Han compares these lazy tendencies in modern autofiction with the brutal self-exposure of a writer like Yukio Mishima, one of his biggest influences. For those unfamiliar with Mishima’s work, the novel Confessions of a Mask is a good place to start, or you can track down a copy of Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, directed by Paul Schrader with a soundtrack by Philip Glass.
In the case of modern autofiction, ARX-Han’s suggestion is simple — write a memoir as good as Blake Butler’s Molly, which confronts the hard truths of his relationship with his wife Molly Brodak, a poet who ended up taking her own life. This is a huge contrast to the tropes of promiscuity, drug use and narcissism that tend to dominate celebrated autofiction books in the 2020s. It’s also a huge contrast to the misanthropic main characters of Michel Houllebecq, who ARX-Han points out are often mirrors of the author’s own nihilism, but exist within carefully-built literary worlds.
After the break we talk a little about ARX-Han’s thoughts on male identity, and how it is shaped by tribalism, and therefore race. His thesis is that sexual jealousy and competition have a racial component, even when this isn’t consciously known or openly acknowledged. A writer of Chinese origin, ARX-Han’s protagonist is white, and obsessed with racial hierarchies, reserving particular contempt for people from Asian backgrounds. We relate this to the wave of far-right protests in the UK, where many attendees stated they were trying to “protect our women and kids” from immigrants. ARX-Han believes this instinct is a hangover from an earlier, more tribal phase of Western society, and will be hard for us to reject or overcome in the near term.
We talk about morality in fiction, and his approach to this in Incel: A Novel. ARX-Han speaks about the ending of the book, which is a masterful moment where the protagonist’s tight, limited perspective is challenged by another character (I’m trying to describe this without spoilers). He explains that this ending came about after some feedback from beta readers, and that it helps to keep the ending somewhat ambiguous, resisting an absolutist moral reading. It also underlines the hints given throughout the book that the protagonist may be autistic — something ARX-Han wanted to leave unanswered for the reader.
ARX-Han also briefly considers the question of free will versus determinism, and how the novel explores this — he recommends the philosopher Gregg D. Caruso as an interesting modern source on this argument. Here’s Caruso on free will and consciousness. ARX-Han is a determinist by instinct, hence the novel’s lack of an absolutist moral framework, which would depend on the existence of free will.
We finish by discussing some of the recent media on the manosphere and adjacent topics, including the drama Adolescence, and Louis Theorux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere. Because both of these are British programmes, he feels that they are somewhat behind the eight-ball when it comes to their analysis of these trends and figures. He connects the focus of these programmes to the grooming gangs scandal, and makes the point that it would be difficult to make a programme about those events without further stoking inter-ethnic tensions. He’s as interested in what these programmes fail to address as he is in the phenomena they explore.
Bringing it back to manosphere figures like Andrew Tate, he points at the influence of evolutionary psychology on bloggers like Chateau Hartiste and Rollo Tomassi, who in the mid-to-late 2000s laid the foundations of manosphere ideologies. From there, ‘black pill’ and incel communities and influencers constructed a model based on their approach to biological determinism, simultaneously flattening the ideas behind the early writing into dumbed-down, short-form video, and making them more mainstream. He considers the people Theorux spoke to to be mere “clowns,” and not worthy of too much consideration, except as an example of maximalist viral spreading.
There may be an audiobook of the novel coming soon, and ARX-Han is working on what sounds like an interesting new novella. Hit the button below to stay up to date with his essays and new work.
Here are some more articles by ARX-Han to read:
Next up: Greg Blackman
In a slight change of order from my original plan, my next guest is a legend of the UK soul and hip-hop scene, and a brilliant multi-media creator — Greg Blackman has worked with luminaries such as Lack of Afro, Genesis Elijah and the Dutty Moonshine Big Band among others. His powerful voice and creative approach to lyrics are unique, and recently, he’s turned his hand to audiobooks with the new satirical horror series Nothing Works Anymore. We’ll be talking about that project, his storied music career, and his advocacy for mental health awareness.
Here are a few other things I’ve been up to recently:
My new book Crisis Masculinity is now available for pre-order, based on my year-long web series of the same name.
I spoke to Mark McG of You Call That Radio about the book and its themes in late July — it was a great conversation.
I’m planning book launches in Edinburgh and Glasgow in September or October — details to follow, hopefully in my next post.
For Revol Press, I recently spoke to author Kirsten J. Lee about her forthcoming book Death and Things: The Existential Labor of Queer Objects.
Until next time… look after each other.
— Bram, Glasgow, August 2026
