Podcast interview - Tooky's Mag (Gabe's Grab Bag) - Part 1

Chatting with Gabriel Sinclair about INCEL and decentralized fiction

I had a fantastic time chatting with

Gabriel K. Sinclair

of

Tooky's Mag

as part of his special ongoing series “Gabe’s Grab Bag,” a spin-off where he interviews authors on a one-on-one basis.

Their core podcast episodes consist of book reviews of Dissident Right or DR-adjacent literature (the mainline podcast series is called the “Sidebar literary podcast”).

Every new self-published writer with zero platform presence faces the mother-of-all cold-start problems: initiating a positive feedback loop of literary attention without any institutional backing (if you’re a new author, I strongly suggest following the advice of

Delicious Tacos

and establishing your platform before you publish your novel).

The guys at Tooky’s were the first outfit to review my debut novel when it first came out, and I’ve been following their work ever since. I’ll always be immensely grateful to them for taking the time to do an in-depth review of my book: getting your first small break as an indie author is by far the hardest piece of traction, and there’s a world where my novel wouldn’t have gained any traction without their help.

In any event, I’m happy to say that they’re one of my favorites in the space altogether: one of the things they do well is mix the high and low, combining serious literary analysis with a healthy sprinkling of verbal shit-posting.

That, in effect, mirrors my own writing style, and perhaps that of Houellebecq and androgenic writers more broadly: the male mind is a bicameral mind: one part shitposting; one part theorycel.

Gabe and had such an interesting discussion that we ended up speaking on two occasions—the link above is just the first of these two episodes.

One thing that really impressed me was the preparatory work Gabe clearly put into the interview—not only did he do the work in terms of taking apart my novel in great detail, but he also showed a surprising amount of knowledge around various related topics; including the work of Nick Land and even certain nuances around Asian-American cultural production. I myself know very little of Land’s work, but the parallels between INCEL and Land’s model of bio-materialist/Darwinian horror are strong and multi-layered. In general, it fascinates me how writers converge across time and space on the same deep thematic axes.

Building up an alternative literary commentariat requires a non-trivial proof-of-work mechanism; not only does a good critic need to read a lot of novels; they also need to say something interesting about these novels. This, as I’ve discovered in the process of writing my own book reviews, is actually a very difficult thing to do, and I salute the guys at Tooky’s for putting the work in.

I hope that you enjoy listening to this interview as much as I enjoyed recording it!