You have picked out this book – possibly in a bookstore, but most likely online – and now you are perusing the “back cover.” You consider yourself something of a snob when it comes to your reading choices, though not in a pretentious way. You’re discerning is all. A serious person of uniquely refined and sophisticated tastes. Perhaps you were drawn in by the provocative, all-caps title, or the cheeky contrast between its memeified typeface and classical-realist cover art. Perhaps you were intrigued by the blurbs and social media chatter invoking transgressive iconoclasts like Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, and Chuck Palahniuk. Or perhaps you’re already an acolyte of this particular indie press and its stated mission of “degeneracy and degradation.” You are, after all, the kind of unflappable literary deviant who actively seeks to have your ethical buttons pushed and your moral boundaries tested. The kind who enjoys nothing quite so much as a vicarious tramp through such aberrantly foul and filthy lives as you could never dare live yourself. And the kind who, even while wallowing in narcissism and self-loathing at your own complicity in same, feels such a profoundly personal anguish at the ongoing commodification of all art beneath the endless crush of content culture that you probably think this book is about you, (don’t you? Don’t you?).
And quite frankly, if you’ve read this far, then maybe it is. Maybe you are exactly who this book is about. And by. And for. And as such, maybe you should give it a look, and let the world know exactly what you think. It’s not like anyone reads anymore anyway. They’re all too busy watching, and posting, and “liking” and “following” to notice a true original like you. So what’s the difference? Why shouldn’t you add your voice to the fray? After all, nothing matters these days quite so much as what you think about it. And as you’ve already mentioned, you do have excellent taste.
Praise for Troll
Kirkus Reviews 100 Best Indie Books of 2023
GenrePunk Magazine’s Top 100 Indie Books of the 21st Century (So Far)
A lacerating, remorseless trip to the bottom of the modern male psyche, shot through with incisive pop cultural insight of the highest and lowest order, and animated with withering humor, Svankmajerian grotesquerie, and an unwavering sense of genuine pathos as the search for love and meaning in the age of Tinder and Trump stumbles on, determined to resist the allure of the void no matter how futile such resistance may seem. It belongs on your grungiest, most dimly lit, and secretly best-loved shelf beside The Elementary Particles, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Martin Amis' Money.
– David Leo Rice, author of The Berlin Wall
Troll recalls that time when we’d gather around the screen to read the new Swaim article or watch the new Strong Bad Email, when internet legends like Zezima gained prestige in micro societies developed around superlative accomplishment in things that don’t actually matter. Fitzgerald’s character is the guy behind the screen, growing filthier and more hate-filled, his ego expanding with his knowledge of obscure films and popular television. As his acerbic wit alone fails to satisfy his entitlement, the smallest slight becomes persecution, and all manner of offence is justified by the amplification of trivial problems, scaled disproportionately to a narrow worldview. I know this guy; we all do. Charming, sinister, and all-too-real, Fitzgerald’s brilliant characterization reveals in unabashed detail his breathy snicker, his feminist misogyny, the toxic social structures under which he came to be, and the continuous dread that extends beyond this book—that he’s going to hurt somebody.
– Charlene Elsby, author of The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty and Violent Faculties
Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll is this year’s summer cringe read. Troll is a balls-out (literally), fevered wet dream that’s been nicely lubed up with drippy pop-culture references and human degradation exercises. Fitzgerald may or may not remind readers of writers named Chuck - Eddy, Klosterman, Palahniuk, Tingle - before they themselves end up ‘chuck’ing Troll into the garbage, where it maybe belongs. As for me, I found Troll to be highly entertaining (I read it while high), and I laughed (and even learned) a lot while rolling around in Fitzgerald’s soupy literary trash. Respect.
- Brian Alan Ellis, author of Hobbies You Enjoy
Dave Fitzgerald is a madman tapdancing on the wing of the 757 and Troll has all the charm of a Harmony Korine movie dubbed into Russian. In this pervasive character study, we go for a roll in the mud, bugs and all, breathing in the dank air and sowing discord, our filmy mouths wide and grinning along the way. Except this American Psycho lives for the age of the algorithm; Troll drags us kicking and screaming into the despicable interior of a professional clickbait artist a la Dante.
- Jason Teal, author of We Were Called Specimens
Fight Club for the Twitter generation. A bold, subversive punk rock debut that's as incisive and provocative as it is hilariously uncomfortable.
– Preston Fassel, author of Beasts of 42nd Street
Open Troll’s pages and submit to a golden shower of vitriol and subverted pathos, of media and over-scrutinised shit, all the time laughing yourself to tears via sitcom hellscapes as your glutted, insta-world, your confederacy of fuck-ups, is stoned into frayed soft focus and porn-sick inceloquence. Open your mouth to breathe – and drown.
– Gary J. Shipley, author of Stab Frenzy
Dave Fitzgerald’s triumphant debut Troll picks at the scab of our moldering culture until bleeds - and it’s profoundly entertaining to watch it ooze. In this outrageously scatological satire, the weed-stoked, masturbating, click-baiting narrator that is “You” dispenses some of the funniest, most disturbing, full-frontal scenes in literature. Fitzgerald has gathered every hot-button reserved for the smartest, most provocative comedians and pushed them all, with equally riotous and sobering effect. At its core, Troll is an important philosophical discourse, beautifully written, exposing our sins of anonymity, selfie-love and hypocrisy. I wish everyone would read it.
- Debra di Blasi, author of Birth of Eros
There is something about the sensation of reading Troll that is like discovering teeth can grow in a human’s liver. Which is to say the novel’s fascinating, and weirdly real, and gets into the tissue of things. Those morbidly wadded and discarded as well as those prone to scar, that knit together in death in protection of the living, in order to show the way something terribly wrong can develop and survive. Except Troll’s main character is still open wounded enough to rage about the calcifying of their identity even as that rage accelerates the process. An abject, humiliated, tooth ache of a human being
– Thomas Kendall, author of How I Killed the Universal Man
Koji Suzuki's novel S describes a haunted spermatozoan that invades your body after reading a particular book. Troll does this. Fitzgerald's relentlessly uncomfortable use of the second person voice has the effect--rather than sweeping 'you' into the book--of porting the book into 'you.' Troll is indeed one haunted gamete.
– John Trefry, author of PLATS and Massive
