Strokin’ With the King: The Troll is Gone – Gwen Hilton
April 28, 2025
The opening sentence of Dave Fitzgerald’s Troll is, “The day wakes you like a toothy blowjob, your turgid pee-boner scraping rough against yesterday’s jeans.” The first time I read that sentence I put down the book for the better part of a year. Maybe it has been more than a year. This is the delicate part about making art about the modern edgelord or depressive or what have you. I read to get away from my too online life. When I am made to read about online lives in the novels of the now the work must be perfect if I am to feel motivated to move forward. Perfectly replicating online languages is not a great goal. Online there is the time in crafting a comment, or there was, the sense of temporal displacement, time dilation, you weren’t anyone, a troll is anonymous ideally, or pseudonymous, and they had the space and time that online realms afforded them to deliver the pithiest retort. Now there is a content churn, a content mill. There is something for every second where we once had to look away to think about what would be said back. I knew this book would not be for me then and I hesitate to recommend it now because this first line does encapsulate what I can’t abide in transgressive fiction.
I love a toothy blowjob. When I wake up in my king size bed with my lover I ask her to bite my cock off. Before I knew I wanted a toothy blowjob people wounded me and I could not stop thinking about it. I addressed this in my Shame review, and I was confronted and harassed about what I say and the kind of sex I like to have while receiving in real life. Here. I’ll tell you. If it ain’t Lorena Bobbitt I don’t want it!
I wish desperately to have my cock torn off and bruised, but at best I get a chomped I love you. This writing is not for the legitimately socially maladjusted. To me it feels a bit Reddit. Oh, Gwen. How can you talk about the socially maladjusted and bring up Reddit? Well, there’s a BBW or maybe I should say SSBBW creator that I’m quite fond of and she has a video using a dildo up against the window in the hotel attached to Blue Jays stadium, maybe during the pandemic, empty, but still thrilling. I like to use the internet to look at nice things like that, and actual murders, presidentially reposted war crimes (regular Pepe account fun ones too) and acts of revenge, violence, and humiliation. The Reddit prose is bloated, verbose without poetry, synonym heavy without generating an intentionality of word choice, and not rhythmic. You can’t feel enough of a beating heart under it beyond proving. Proving, while the source of tremendous online and bleeding into interpersonal joys, must go so far beyond if it is to be done like this in literature. Poke beyond my schlubby body and you will find Cyrano. Cyrano edited. This book is intentionally unwieldy, but intentionally unwieldy cannot be DFW-downstream with a dash of Jay McInerny. The more an individual’s filth is detailed unless it dovetails into a-ha moments of genius or action it just becomes the grime that clogs gears and creates more inertia. A funny, mean book must be razor-sharp. Good jokes are surrounded by walls of fat and fall flat with no care for tension or release.
The only other real troll I knew in my life had his body completely destroyed, or at least some really important parts of his spine destroyed, after calling a group of guys on the street faggots. He had a tense relationship with me, and my friends, and who knows who else. You do. I can draw his penis from memory, and when I post sketches of it online he starts reaching out to the people we both know. We’re almost thirty. I’m posting dick drawings. He still won’t kill himself. That’s one paragraph.
This book begins and ends with the penis and pain. I’ve learned to not think about my urethra. I won’t think about this stylistic mishmash overkill much more.
This Seroquel dream monologue of disdain for the world is not something I can recommend because an R. Crumb comic is not 500 pages of literature here.