We’ve come a long way since Jay McInerney’s bestselling Bright Lights, Big City hit the shelves — 40 years chronologically, although solving for the digital revolution’s impact on the human psyche, it might as well have been centuries ago. Even so, with regard to character arcs, ARX-Han, in his self-published and increasingly popular novel Incel, picks up right where McInerney’s famously second-person, nameless narrator left off. Just as McInerney, with his deadpan wit, eased us from skepticism into cynicism, ARX-Han’s Incel antihero, anon, continues the downward trajectory with mordant self-parody, sliding past nihilism into despair. Nothing new under the Black Hole Sun, so to speak.