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Dox
tragickal presents DOX
When Bela Ogórek starts using SeekingArrangement to help pay down her family debt, she meets a wealthy young man involved in right-wing Internet politics. Her sister violently disapproves.
This is a novel of cultural decline. There will not be a recovery.
When Bela Ogórek starts using SeekingArrangement to help pay down her family debt, she meets a wealthy young man involved in right-wing Internet politics. Her sister violently disapproves.
This is a novel of cultural decline. There will not be a recovery.
235 pages, Paperback
Published February 22, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 16, 2021
Alex Beaumais’ debut novel Dox takes place in “the thousand mirrored snowflake debt-binge of Western Civilization”: aka Toronto. Characters form concave ideograms of their Internet avatars, eviscerating the novel’s five-pointed musculature. Individuals shell themselves of thought via Nootropics prescribed by Reddit sidebars. More than a gimmick, the erasure of text, cat toying censorship, strips ideologues of identity, inflating the novel’s formal fulcrums into Sugar Baby love dolls – rousing us far beyond redaction.
December 16, 2021
ALL-ENCOMPASSING POLITICS ETCHED IN GLISTENING PROSE
On November 22nd, 2022, the day I finished reading Alex Beaumais’ debut novel Dox (Tragickal Books), reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling’s house. It was decried as “doxxing,” or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions.
In Rowling’s case these opinions were famously about her objections to trans rights and the definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years fulfilled, in the minds of many people, the role of a transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity. Quickly people on Twitter chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling’s address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.
There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumais’ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one’s life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.
In the author’s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally-conscious, highly-educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novel’s landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.
The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his Weltanschauung vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:
“At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbols—he hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerism…You could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.”
The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the Ogóreks, and Rick’s encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the “novel of ideas”—and this is what Dox seems to struggle to extricate itself from being—is at its thinnest. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters’ minds and is less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; maybe people in Toronto talk like this in reality and I have just never crossed paths with them.
Dox is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a diving-into.
Highlights of the book include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain lovers’ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. Beaumais has also written a short piece of spectacular fiction called “Brickshooter’s Infowar” the prose of which glistens with mentation as it mimics with eerie specificity the leaps and contortions of a consciousness shaped by online “second life,” to a degree approaching what James Joyce would sound like if he were inhabiting a sci-fi video game millennia in the future. If this, and Dox, are signals of what Beaumais is capable of, there are tremendous works coming in the future.
On November 22nd, 2022, the day I finished reading Alex Beaumais’ debut novel Dox (Tragickal Books), reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling’s house. It was decried as “doxxing,” or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions.
In Rowling’s case these opinions were famously about her objections to trans rights and the definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years fulfilled, in the minds of many people, the role of a transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity. Quickly people on Twitter chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling’s address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.
There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumais’ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one’s life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.
In the author’s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally-conscious, highly-educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novel’s landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.
The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his Weltanschauung vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:
“At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbols—he hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerism…You could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.”
The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the Ogóreks, and Rick’s encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the “novel of ideas”—and this is what Dox seems to struggle to extricate itself from being—is at its thinnest. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters’ minds and is less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; maybe people in Toronto talk like this in reality and I have just never crossed paths with them.
Dox is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a diving-into.
Highlights of the book include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain lovers’ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. Beaumais has also written a short piece of spectacular fiction called “Brickshooter’s Infowar” the prose of which glistens with mentation as it mimics with eerie specificity the leaps and contortions of a consciousness shaped by online “second life,” to a degree approaching what James Joyce would sound like if he were inhabiting a sci-fi video game millennia in the future. If this, and Dox, are signals of what Beaumais is capable of, there are tremendous works coming in the future.
February 11, 2023
Thirty years from now the people who read Dox will struggle with the question: Is this satire?
Few books capture the societal madness that started in North America around 2016. Two of the main characters are so 'online' that it's hard to believe that they are made of flesh and not merely avatars attached to opaque accounts.
There is one character who stands out against this. The normie. The one that will exist long after the madness has passed. The normie is what binds past, present and future. Without the normie, there are no abnormals. No blips. No intellectual fads. The normal is the constant that future readers will see themselves in.
Beyond its deep dive into online culture, and how it warps peoples perceptions of the real world, Dox is a pleasure to read. Highly recommend to anyone who loves a good read.
Few books capture the societal madness that started in North America around 2016. Two of the main characters are so 'online' that it's hard to believe that they are made of flesh and not merely avatars attached to opaque accounts.
There is one character who stands out against this. The normie. The one that will exist long after the madness has passed. The normie is what binds past, present and future. Without the normie, there are no abnormals. No blips. No intellectual fads. The normal is the constant that future readers will see themselves in.
Beyond its deep dive into online culture, and how it warps peoples perceptions of the real world, Dox is a pleasure to read. Highly recommend to anyone who loves a good read.
April 6, 2026
I’ve been putting this off for a while but suddenly found myself spurred to action when I stumbled upon a recent negative review of this delightful book. Let me start off by saying that anyone approaching this novel with the intention of finding some sort of moral imperative is going to be disappointed. And that’s just the way it is. If the book makes you feel misanthropic, it’s because its characters subject you to the flux of minutiae you might find when confronted with an actual person. Beaumais’ narrative neutrality engenders a playground wherein you, the reader, shoulder the didactic responsibility of drawing your own conclusions. The novel thrives on this neutrality; it offers nothing palliative as nostrum.
Alex Beaumais’ Dox places its two main characters at the polar extremes of their respective political axes: on the one hand we have Rick Speer, an alt-right white nationalist who is editorially involved with a Stormfront-like extremist website—on the other, Ariel Ogorek, an embodiment of the performative millennial shitlib, an archetypal SJW. These two create the framework in which the material is contextualized—when we are treated with their histories/subjected to their perspectives, we are made to suffer the same hellishly metacognitive way they see the world. They traffic in the parlance and are embroiled in the semantics of their respective ingroups, and are both generally insufferable—but they are far from one-dimensional. And that’s where Beaumais shines: he doesn’t take the easy road, and instead lovingly renders his characters in full color. If you’re younger than, say, forty years old, or have spent enough time on the internet, then you know these people; you’ve met them, or facsimiles of them, before.
(Spoilers ahead)
The plot is as mercurial as its author’s intentions are inscrutable. The story is elaborately constructed—there are six chapters (including the prologue), all of which take place within the same 24 hours, arranged achronologically. Strewn throughout the novel are the members of Ariel’s family, largely entrained in the wake of the ideological conflict between her and Rick (who only meet because Rick gets involved with Ariel’s sister, Bela, through SeekingArrangement). As the novel’s title would imply, the eponymous ‘dox’ is the premise around which the book is centered—Ariel enlists one of her hacker friends to uncover Rick’s well-concealed (but not wholly untraceable) online identity as an alt-right spokespiece, and it’s pretty much gloves-off from there. In the dox’s immediate aftermath Rick is driven to extreme measures in order to prevent his life from being ruined, and when faced with his impending cancellation he ultimately capitulates to the demands of his blackmailers. This is sort of the fulcrum upon which the novel applies its stress: when push comes to shove, Rick has to reconcile his right-wing beliefs with his own cowardice at being exposed, cancelled, and subsequently blacklisted, culminating in an episode of Sartrean bad faith: you realize that some part of him consciously rejects the belief system he (anonymously) proselytizes, that he’s internalized some of the cultural stigma surrounding people like him, and when shit hits the fan he resorts to some pretty funny self-abasing apologia. Simultaneously, Ariel grapples with her own ideology, the compulsive praxis of which forces the reader to wonder how much of what she’s doing is performative vs. how much of it she actually believes—and by the end of the novel it seems that nothing could satisfy her bloodthirst—that behind her carefully constructed political visage of equity and equality, she is actually fueled by hatred, plain and simple. Beaumais’s employment of hysterical realism is such that Ariel, while clearly a caricature, doesn’t feel like a caricature—as you are made to observe how she thinks, you realize the way someone could ostensibly end up like her. As mentioned before, you know people like her…they’re all around you.
Due to the book’s unconventional structure, the novel’s chronological endpoint occurs 3/4 of the way through the page count. The remainder of the book is where things get really interesting. While the two leading characters themselves are representative of a certain cultural enantiodromia, natural products of the zeitgeist’s acceleratory volute, the rest of the novel’s characters are normies, people blissfully unaware/uninvolved with identity politics. While these characters are drawn into their petty conflicts, somewhere beneath the psychic substrate a cancer is metastasizing—and one realizes that the true Jungian shadow cast upon the world that Beaumais has envisaged lies in the man overlooked: in this case, ‘the Pomeranian,’ the Ogorek’s hideous old neighbor, who is revealed through circumstance to be doing something disgusting (though we never quite figure out what) in his basement. I liked this a lot. In fact, this is what sold me on the whole novel, is the abrupt non-sequitur of the Pomeranian’s monstrous obtrusive presence which acts to completely dismantle any of the political bickering that prefaces it—the implication being that this force, this intransigent violence exists not as a consequence of politics, but preempts it, or informs it—the universal perversions of the Pomeranian (whatever it is they may be) could be ubiquitous, wholly unremarkable, and at the same time deeply disturbing and powerful.
Beaumais’ prose is well-rounded and propulsive. The novel is a page turner, the characters are intelligent and quippy, and peppered throughout the text are sharpied redactions which are meant to (I believe) obscure some of Rick’s more problematic sentiments, lol. The novel’s utilization of modern-day argot shouldn’t put anyone off. If you’re aware this novel exists then you’re no doubt familiar with the terminology employed within it, unavoidable as it is.
In the past few years we’ve seen a few people try and take a stab at the cultural mania resultant from Trump and Covid, so much so that to even mention it here might elicit some warranted eye-rolling—but no one has done it like Beaumais. The novel seems a uniquely fitting form for the exploration of the West’s collective psychosis simply because it allows for extrapolation through interiority—and when we are chaperoned by an author as keen and incisive as Beaumais, the exploded-view diagram of the nightmarish world we perpetuated compels us to see how fucking stupid all of us were back then—but never again, right? Lol.
Alex Beaumais’ Dox places its two main characters at the polar extremes of their respective political axes: on the one hand we have Rick Speer, an alt-right white nationalist who is editorially involved with a Stormfront-like extremist website—on the other, Ariel Ogorek, an embodiment of the performative millennial shitlib, an archetypal SJW. These two create the framework in which the material is contextualized—when we are treated with their histories/subjected to their perspectives, we are made to suffer the same hellishly metacognitive way they see the world. They traffic in the parlance and are embroiled in the semantics of their respective ingroups, and are both generally insufferable—but they are far from one-dimensional. And that’s where Beaumais shines: he doesn’t take the easy road, and instead lovingly renders his characters in full color. If you’re younger than, say, forty years old, or have spent enough time on the internet, then you know these people; you’ve met them, or facsimiles of them, before.
(Spoilers ahead)
The plot is as mercurial as its author’s intentions are inscrutable. The story is elaborately constructed—there are six chapters (including the prologue), all of which take place within the same 24 hours, arranged achronologically. Strewn throughout the novel are the members of Ariel’s family, largely entrained in the wake of the ideological conflict between her and Rick (who only meet because Rick gets involved with Ariel’s sister, Bela, through SeekingArrangement). As the novel’s title would imply, the eponymous ‘dox’ is the premise around which the book is centered—Ariel enlists one of her hacker friends to uncover Rick’s well-concealed (but not wholly untraceable) online identity as an alt-right spokespiece, and it’s pretty much gloves-off from there. In the dox’s immediate aftermath Rick is driven to extreme measures in order to prevent his life from being ruined, and when faced with his impending cancellation he ultimately capitulates to the demands of his blackmailers. This is sort of the fulcrum upon which the novel applies its stress: when push comes to shove, Rick has to reconcile his right-wing beliefs with his own cowardice at being exposed, cancelled, and subsequently blacklisted, culminating in an episode of Sartrean bad faith: you realize that some part of him consciously rejects the belief system he (anonymously) proselytizes, that he’s internalized some of the cultural stigma surrounding people like him, and when shit hits the fan he resorts to some pretty funny self-abasing apologia. Simultaneously, Ariel grapples with her own ideology, the compulsive praxis of which forces the reader to wonder how much of what she’s doing is performative vs. how much of it she actually believes—and by the end of the novel it seems that nothing could satisfy her bloodthirst—that behind her carefully constructed political visage of equity and equality, she is actually fueled by hatred, plain and simple. Beaumais’s employment of hysterical realism is such that Ariel, while clearly a caricature, doesn’t feel like a caricature—as you are made to observe how she thinks, you realize the way someone could ostensibly end up like her. As mentioned before, you know people like her…they’re all around you.
Due to the book’s unconventional structure, the novel’s chronological endpoint occurs 3/4 of the way through the page count. The remainder of the book is where things get really interesting. While the two leading characters themselves are representative of a certain cultural enantiodromia, natural products of the zeitgeist’s acceleratory volute, the rest of the novel’s characters are normies, people blissfully unaware/uninvolved with identity politics. While these characters are drawn into their petty conflicts, somewhere beneath the psychic substrate a cancer is metastasizing—and one realizes that the true Jungian shadow cast upon the world that Beaumais has envisaged lies in the man overlooked: in this case, ‘the Pomeranian,’ the Ogorek’s hideous old neighbor, who is revealed through circumstance to be doing something disgusting (though we never quite figure out what) in his basement. I liked this a lot. In fact, this is what sold me on the whole novel, is the abrupt non-sequitur of the Pomeranian’s monstrous obtrusive presence which acts to completely dismantle any of the political bickering that prefaces it—the implication being that this force, this intransigent violence exists not as a consequence of politics, but preempts it, or informs it—the universal perversions of the Pomeranian (whatever it is they may be) could be ubiquitous, wholly unremarkable, and at the same time deeply disturbing and powerful.
Beaumais’ prose is well-rounded and propulsive. The novel is a page turner, the characters are intelligent and quippy, and peppered throughout the text are sharpied redactions which are meant to (I believe) obscure some of Rick’s more problematic sentiments, lol. The novel’s utilization of modern-day argot shouldn’t put anyone off. If you’re aware this novel exists then you’re no doubt familiar with the terminology employed within it, unavoidable as it is.
In the past few years we’ve seen a few people try and take a stab at the cultural mania resultant from Trump and Covid, so much so that to even mention it here might elicit some warranted eye-rolling—but no one has done it like Beaumais. The novel seems a uniquely fitting form for the exploration of the West’s collective psychosis simply because it allows for extrapolation through interiority—and when we are chaperoned by an author as keen and incisive as Beaumais, the exploded-view diagram of the nightmarish world we perpetuated compels us to see how fucking stupid all of us were back then—but never again, right? Lol.
March 12, 2026
The premise is very flawed and not too believable if you think about it just a little. The characters were not compelling to me, and they babble about political issues and speak like they're posting on social media instead of having a real conversation. It's a book about nothing interesting. However, I was able to rant about everything I hated in it for two hours. You can give that a listen if so inclined. https://youtu.be/3yvDXrV8YhQ
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