Hermit by Chris McQueer review: 'rings heartbreakingly true'

This debut novel from Chris McQueer shows the darker side of the expression ‘goblin mode’, writes Roger Cox

In 2002, the lexicographers at Oxford University Press - the folks who compile the Oxford English Dictionary - shortlisted three words or expressions for their annual "Oxford Word of the Year", and invited the public to have their say in an online poll. Of the 340,000-odd votes cast, "goblin mode" was the runaway winner, hoovering up 318,956 votes.

Defined as "a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations", the expression first started cropping up online in 2009, but it was during the pandemic that it really started to enter common usage, with millions stuck at home looking for an expression that described the state of wearing your pyjamas all day while doomscrolling, eating comfort food and playing video games. (It's no coincidence that PC Gamer Magazine ran a campaign to have its readers vote for goblin mode as Oxford Word of the Year, "because goblin mode rules".) 

Jamie Skelton, the teenage hero of Chris McQueer's debut novel Hermit, has - as the saying goes - "gone full goblin mode". However, if the phrase was often used during lockdown by smug middle-class office workers delighted to be able to work remotely from the comfort of their beds for a few months, in Jamie's case it has altogether darker connotations. 

In the couple of years since leaving school, where he was badly bullied, Jamie has been unable to get a job. In fact, he now spends so much time in his bedroom, surrounded by piles of rotting food and filthy clothes, that he's barely able to leave the house he shares with his single mum, Fiona. A quiet, skinny kid, sensitive but anxious, Jamie now spends most of his time online, playing video games with his only friend, Lee, and chatting via a headset. (Sample conversation: "'Awrite, wee sacks?' 'Awright, prick?'") Conversations with his mum, meanwhile, are mostly conducted via WhatsApp.

Lee lives just up the road from Jamie, on a council estate in an unidentified Scottish town, but the pair have never actually met in real life. That looks set to change, however, when Lee tells Jamie about a guy called Seb he's met online. Seb is older than them ("looks about 30") and lives in London, where he periodically invites "incels" (involuntary celibates) to come and stay with him rent free. And now Seb has asked Lee and Jamie if they'd like to come and visit. It'll be great, Lee reckons: just junk food and video games and "wee guys" like them and no parents nagging them to get jobs. Seb has even offered to pay for their bus tickets...

Jamie isn't stupid - he knows that this whole scenario should be setting off alarm bells and says as much. Scared of losing his only friend, however, and with his mum finally losing her patience with him and yelling at him to "get a grip and sort yer life oot!", he reluctantly agrees to join Lee, "to start a new life and be somebody else." 

In the wrong hands Jamie's story could have felt like a slightly preachy cautionary tale about the dangers of the internet, but thanks to Chris McQueer's forensic attention to detail, both in terms of his descriptive writing and particularly in terms of the dialogue, every single thing about it rings shudderingly, heartbreakingly true.

The real genius of this book, though, is the complex, nuanced picture it paints of the various factors that allow people to end up in Jamie's situation. A lesser writer might have framed this as a straightforward story about the perils of cyberspace, but McQueer is careful to show the wider forces at play: the way the education system can sometimes fail those who don't fit in; the way a lack of hope for the future inevitably leads people to seek out whatever comforts are available in the present; the way that isolation can quickly lead to alienation.

At one point Jamie's mum worries that his goblin mode existence is all her fault; this book shows that it isn't, and quietly emphasises that the Jamies of this world are our collective responsibility.

Hermit, by Chris McQueer, Wildfire, £18.99