WHAT THEY'RE SAYING
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 Our Lady of the Inferno
Flannery O’Connor wrote that fiction is not an escape but rather ‘a plunge into reality, and it’s very shocking to the system.’ This is an apt description of Dave Fitzgerald’s audacious debut novel. Not for the faint of heart, Troll drags us into the murky, chaotic interior of its nameless protagonist, an unholy combination of Patrick Bateman, Rabbit Angstrom, and someone entirely new – a 21st century Frankenstein’s monster who is not only influenced by but stitched together from the body parts of pop culture, post-postmodern ennui, and the Id-gone-wild sadism of the faceless Internet. Worst yet is the knowledge that we not only helped create the monster, but we are complicit in its thriving.
– Darrin Doyle, author of The Beast in Aisle 34
Talk about your entertaining novels, Dave Fitzgerald has written one. I was all in, jumpshots that clip to cumshots, some near-bioluminescent glow, I felt like I was driving a hovercraft while wearing a ski mask, Troll is audacious, advanced, untried, and ground-breaking. It’s the good shit. A novel where world-making involves sea breezes and briefcases, chicken nuggets and swingset sweethearts, social movements, and gutter water. Wooden alphabet blocks in the donation bin, analgesia, faecal matter, and human selfies on several fronts. Get all in with Dave Fitzgerald, it’s a wild ride, it’s a novel and a movie, and a stage production all in one. A dissident mythical peach. A darkly side-splitting odyssey. Get all in y’hear.
– Shane Jesse Christmass, author of Yeezus in Furs
Shot through with strange beauty, Troll is an uncanny excursion into the warped musings of an unsympathetic troll. In the transgressive tradition of Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares, it brilliantly explores casual depravity: of a culture entrenched in cynical consumption, the inhumanity of anonymity, disconnection, and the psychic stain of nihilism on the human soul.
– Matthew Burnside, author of Wiki of Infinite Sorrows
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
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 New House
Dave Fitzgerald warned me before I began that, as a woman, I might find Troll hard to read. Purportedly a story about a misogynist stoner internet troll, Troll is undeniably nihilistic—but it’s not woman-hating. So, while it’s true that Troll devotes whole chapters to the excruciating minutiae of a professional pothead’s day, including detailed play-by-plays of the porn he watches and encyclopedic accounts of his bowel movements, the book is never so detestable that you want to put it down. Instead, weirdly, it’s driven by heart, and thanks to Fitzgerald’s incredible command of the English language (seriously, you might want to keep a dictionary handy for this one), literal shit has never seemed so highbrow. At all times, I found myself justifying the narrator’s actions for him, thinking, ‘He just wants to feel something.’ He’s the modern-day everyman, an endearing-if-not-cautionary tale about where we go from here.
– Jess Hagemann, author of Headcheese
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 Hexis and Bedlam
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 Terminal Park
Dave Fitzgerald’s triumphant debut, Troll, picks at the scab of our moldering culture until it bleeds—and it is 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, disturbing, full-frontal scenes in literature—and toilet. 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 Trolls 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 The Autodidacts
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 artiste à la Dante.
– Jason Teal, author of We Were Called Specimens
