Within the first 10 pages of Rejection, a new book by Tony Tulathimutte about incels, a 25-year-old named Craig masturbates so much, and so forcefully, he permanently dulls the nerve endings in his penis.

By this point, he’s been politely turned down by pretty much every woman in his life. He parrots feminist talking points and therapyspeak, thinking they’ll make him seem more attractive and approachable. He drops the words “trauma” and “folx” into the group chat. On his dating profile, he’s “Unshakably serious about consent” and “Abortion’s #1 fan.” He hasn’t adopted his robotically leftist personality cynically—instead, the author makes clear, Craig’s been conditioned to earnestly believe that stock progressive values are the most ethically righteous on offer.

In college, Craig hits on one of his female friends. She says no without actually saying “no.” He walks it back, apologizes for “being weird,” reassures her that he “gets it,” it’s fine! The next day, under the guise of seeking clarity, he emails her three times to debrief and ask, in the most unsexy way possible: Why did you reject me, though?

She ghosts, of course.

Rule #1 about rejection: Don’t dispute it, especially in a romantic context. That only makes it worse.

He masturbates furiously for the next thirty years (without lubrication because he’s terrified of his roommates hearing). When he eventually does have sex, at 31, his dick is so ravaged by friction that he can’t ejaculate. His status as “rejected person” becomes his identity and overarching philosophy. He wallows in resentment, self-righteousness, self-pity, and hatred of women, who he calls “treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets.” By 40, he’s moderating a subreddit for incels and jerking off with a plumber’s glove so he can feel something, anything.

Eventually, he walks into a crowded restaurant wearing a ski mask and carrying what’s strongly implied to be an AK-47. You know what happens next.

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Fiction about bitter, isolated men is not new. The Underground Man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground was one of the first. Holden Caulfield was arguably blackpilled. But this is the first book I’ve read that focuses specifically on inceldom: a type of soft, entitled loneliness amplified and fed by the internet.

It’s made of seven short stories, each one about an incel. The narrator follows them via free indirect speech, leading to the unsettling (but kind of fun) feeling that you’re the incel’s guardian angel. You’re hovering over his shoulder and wandering around his brain while he alienates every romantic prospect in his life and recedes into the depths of Pornhub.

The story about Craig made rounds on incel and MRA subreddits when it was originally published in N+1 five years ago. A relative few in the forums seemed to understand it. On r/incelexit, a 222-comment thread about the story begins: “I can see what the author is trying to get at, but sympathise too much with [the] main character that I can’t quite grasp the deeper meaning.” Later in the thread, someone writes: “The reason you guys have trouble understanding the story is because it’s satirizing the sorts of people who post here” (thank you). In r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates, a men’s rights group, a thread on the same story goes 67 comments deep. Redditor u/melthengylf sums it up well: “people don’t get love because they are good… neither [do] they get love because they are strong… I mean, these factors matter. But mainly, people get love — including getting laid — when they become real. This guy was fucking fake.”

Not all incels in Rejection (or in real life) are men. The second story follows a late-twentysomething white woman who devolves into a femcel after she fucks her childhood friend and he ices her out. A third story centers on a thirtysomething 5’4” Thai American gay man who wants to be a dom top, despite being a “jittery, inexpressive virgin.” He’s too insecure to get close to anyone, and no one can satisfy his twisted fantasies, so he becomes a gaycel. The only way he can express himself sexually is by writing a 4,000-word script for a custom order anime-inspired porn video. He emails it to an OnlyFans creator. Here’s an excerpt:

To finish off I thrust my cock back in your mouth; it’s so fat your lips form an airtight seal around it, and with each shuddering spurt the cum forcefully expels in long unbroken ribbons out of your nostrils, ears, asshole, urethra, belly button, and tear ducts simultaneously, because you’re fully ‘topped off’ and each spurt displaces the last. By now the friction from all the high-velocity reaming has caused my glans to glow orange-hot like E.T.’s fingertip, the light visible through your throat…

More than a partner, what each of Rejection’s characters seem to want is a story. They want their lives to go somewhere. Turned down and passed over, they sit alone in front of their screens and watch everyone else’s life change while theirs stays the same. Rejection hurts — on a neurological level, it lights up the dorsal anterior cingulate, the same part of the brain that processes physical pain — but it’s emotionally painful because it’s so uneventful. Often, you’re simply ignored. Nothing happens. It’s impossible to get closure in a relationship that never began. “Your life can’t move forward,” after being rejected, Tulathimutte writes, “so it moves sideways, to a parallel reality” where “absence becomes the realest thing in your world.” In the end, each of the book’s characters pulls some kind of dramatic, self-destructive stunt meant to give their lives direction and meaning after years of basically just staring at their computers posting and masturbating. They shoot up restaurants. They try to sabotage their exes’ weddings. They liveblog their demented sexual fantasies for their family and friends.

More of us are alone today than at any point in human history. Rates of singledom for people in their 30s and 40s are 30% higher than they were a generation ago. A third of Gen Z-ers say they’ll never marry. Research shows that being in a committed, long-term relationship makes you happier, healthier, and richer. But an overlooked benefit of being in a relationship is simply that it gives your life shape. It’s easier to see how you’ve grown when someone else is there to watch.

Like most good works of realistic fiction, Tulathimutte’s stories compress and dramatize reality to reveal how it works. After seeing the same pattern play out in each one, I understand his theory of how a well-adjusted person can become an incel. It goes something like this. (1) Rejection, usually by someone they perceive as lower status than themselves (which makes it sting even more); (2) Instead of accepting it, they grasp for control; they bargain with their rejectors, which makes the rejection more severe; (3) They over-curate their identities online, performatively posting in hopes of saving face, which just makes them seem even more fake; (4) In the end, with no other moves to make besides acceptance, they choose eternal victimhood because they’re too proud to admit defeat. And once they do that, they’re basically doomed.

—Harris Sockel