The trashed halls of pop culture are littered with Slenderman copypastas taken to horrific conclusions and jokes turned into career-threatening scandals. Yes, it’s true. These days, we have a lot of trouble figuring out just how seriously we should take anything—anything at all.
Enter Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll, an encyclopedia of cringe, the novel no one asked for, but which we most certainly deserve. You shouldn’t take it seriously, but you should definitely be creeped out, irritated, and maybe even nauseous.
Set throughout 2016-2017 in a nondescript college town full of fratholes, door-to-door child missionaries, incestual pot-dealers and burqa-clad activists, Troll’s neckbeard main character tells his extensive, pathetic story through a 2nd person point of view which may make you feel like you can smell this guy’s stank breath, my God.
Every terrible opinion imaginable (“the Holocaust is the Beatles of genocide”)—spouted by that dude no one should have invited to the party—fills its pages alongside catalogues of scat puns (“soft serve”) and porn binges, all told with a perverse love of wordplay and reference that would make Nabokov blush.
The closest thing we get to a title for our protagonist is Sweats, a dreaded work nickname. Otherwise, he’s just another stealthy coward. He’s a writer of “publishable pop garbage” for a clickbait website named GRUNDL whose IRL analogue may or may not rhyme with Scuzz-Bleed. He churns out listicles like “Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That: Top 10 Most Homophobic Shows of the 90s.”
He loathes his job, but he can’t quit. He needs the paycheck so he can splurge on weed and takeout. He dreams of escaping into a life of luxury where he can “treat the Palm Islands of Dubai like a lazy river, tubing naked through trillion-dollar suburbs and pissing in their saltwater infinity pools.” He tries to finish Playground Zero, an exploitationist screenplay à la Tarantino about a false-flag school shooting (oh yeah, he went there), but he just doesn’t have the gusto. He’ll totally show you where he’s at with it though, once he’s done smoking weed by the ounce through a “diminutive” pipe named Blaze Pascal and watching thousands of hours of television.
The malaise hits him hard. He copes the only way an Internet-addicted American male knows how: by inducing violent rage in unsuspecting bystanders. He used to do it online, maybe through ForDrapersOnly.wordpress.com, that Mad Men fan site he used to run, or through meme cuts of 9/11 footage, but now he needs a stronger strain of menace. He decides “offline trolling” is the way to go, and he’s off to the races.
But it doesn’t go too smoothly. Sweats wants love, or maybe he just wants sex, or maybe he does want love after all if it’s with someone he could actually talk to. And he loves culture, damn it. That’s why he’s so mad about everything he holds dear—the Internet, movies, music, television—turning into an orgy of shallow reboots and corporate shills. Everything used to be so cool. What happened? Why is he wandering through life, inciting race riots at karaoke bars and schooling video store clerks on Ingmar Bergman?
Of course, he’s not the problem. He might be a “kush god,” a “hypocaust,” a poet of pornography and junk culture and bowel movements, but seriously, if everyone just liked what he liked, the world would be a better place.
Right?
In Troll, Dave Fitzgerald, whose own writing appears in Heavy Feather Review, has accomplished the unenviable task of writing one of the most detestable, annoying characters in recent memory. Not because he commits terrible sins, although Troll is full of pearl-clutching moments, but because almost every sentence in this book makes you want to look away out of secondhand humiliation and disgust.
Sweats is a voice that gets under your skin in no time at all. He relishes in dishing out his take on Family Guy as a “distillation of middle-class American life bleak enough to make us all feel better” as much as he enjoys describing a play-by-play of an incest gangbang he watched last night where “a familial game of musical chairs ensues; gran dives under the maid’s skirts for a mouthful of avuncular nutsack; Johnny blows his load all over his mother’s tawny tummy, a single strand momentarily connecting them like a diaphanous umbilical cord.”
Without a doubt, Troll does exactly what it set out to do, aiming for a moving target of geeked-out rage and hitting its money shot with incredibly high skidmarks. It’s an unbelievable and oftentimes disturbingly hilarious literary stunt, intended neither for the thrillseeker nor the faint of heart, but for those cold-hearted losers who know just what they’re getting into.
Troll, by Dave Fitzgerald. Whiskey Tit, February 2023. 590 pages. $24.00, paper.
Stephen Meisel is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia. His fiction and poetry are published/forthcoming in X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Chariton Review. He can be criticized or complimented at meiselstephen@gmail.com.
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