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'
