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NOTE: as with all the others I’ve done in the Other Books series, I have not read Troll; this is just pure guesswork and a bit of fun that will hopefully persuade you [and myself] to check out his book.

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You don’t know much about the author except he writes a lot of thoughtful reviews on indie books and is clearly a troll otherwise how could he write a book called Troll.

Or maybe it’s his alter-ego?

They [Gitlin & Nuechterlein] do say there is something dark and/or pedantic in there that crawls out now and then without you kno-

Apparently, this is all in second person, which is risky as after ten pages or so the narrative can start to sound like an accusation. Or worse, a list of YOU axioms. But the review you just read on Kirkus promised it was written well, so you don’t need to worry about that.

The review also says that it’s about a youngish uni graduate who failed to escape his home town and now he’s both stuck and adrift, reading books he barely understands, wanking over sex clips from Shameless [including the William H Macy ones], dropping weed into bottles of Asahi, wanking over KOREAN MUM BIG TITS FUCKS SON IN KITCHEN WITH DAD SLEEPING NEARBY, smashing the half-drunk bottle, wanking over Solaris wife, Solaris mum, Solaris dad, setting the whole bottle mess on fire, calling his cat a nosy cunt etc.

You think, hmm, you know this guy, this protagonist, and at some point he’s gonna either become a troll online or dress up as a literal one and go full [Klaus] Kinski in the local supermarket. With a firearm, if he’s American, or a samurai sword, if he’s white-other.

Your gut says the first one, online troll, at least for most of the book, perhaps as a way to juxtapose the nasty shit he does in forums with the powerless null-face of his daily routine.

Here’s the blurb on the back:

‘Here you are, shopping for books online because honestly, who has the energy to go out anymore? There are so many people out there, all buying the same Oprah-stickered crap to take to the coffee shop and Instagram next to their PSLs and blueberry muffins with one perfect bite taken out (or pretend to read until their latest Tinder date shows up). It’s insufferable – the performance of it all – and everyone knows small presses are where the real literary vanguard is happening these days anyway. Well, maybe not everyone. But that’s kind of the point of your being here, isn’t it?

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 felt drawn to click on this particular novel due to its 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.’

All in second person, like the novel. And directly talking to you, the reader. Accusatory? Pedantic? Yes, but that can work if it fits the main character. Does it work here? Maybe. Not sure. Some of the references are a bit broad, a bit obvious – Oprah, Tinder – possibly an attempt to appeal to the kind of people the main character claims to despise but secretly wants to be absorbed into the bosom of.

But then, some of the excerpts in the Kirkus review are more precise, less generalised.

Hhmmnm.

This puzzles you.

You start to think that it might be a-

Style-wise, how does this run?

Is it just the condensed journal of an online troll, exposed via his own thoughts, theories, lunacy? And how many people like that are truly out there?

There is a temptation with this kind of narrative to tack on a small act of terrorism or violence at the end, a dramatic release to five hundred pages of coiled frustration/rage. Mostly so you can avoid the criticism of, ‘this is shit, nothing happens, he just wanks all the time.’ Will Troll go that route too?

I hope not.

Better for the troll to keep on being a troll, story-wise and thematically.

That last part was typed without really thinking, but I’ve run with it a bit more and what I think I want to say is…the theme should be stagnation/powerlessness, for the troll to get practically nothing out of what he is doing cos what can he get, really? Most online trolls go nowhere, and only a very select few manage to turn the grind into dopey right wing shit like The Quartering, at which point they’ve gone beyond regular trolling into a type of commercial entity i.e. it’s selling stuff now not trolling, and what they’re selling is stupidity. And dick pills.

Do not give this troll a narrative release, not even a desaturated supermarket shooting.

The only escape should be for him to join an NGO and get his nuts blown off saving a toddler in Nyala. Then we can call him a decent guy.

But he won’t do that as he’s too far gone. Or I think he will be in the version of the novel playing out in my head.

Is a troll too pathetic to be too far gone?

Wouldn’t that require someone to notice them?

You think so, but you don’t-

Okay, here’s my full spec [with spoilers if I’m right!]:

The novel starts with a five-page rant from the narrator, a manic critique of something mainstream like The Simpsons or Deadwood. Probably the former as Deadwood is too niche for the person he’s cornered. But after the first rant, he does try to move on to Deadwood, however, the guy he’s talking to isn’t listening, he’s staring at a uni student who’s just come into the bar they’re in. The troll mutters into a murky black pint glass before switching to how much of a slut the uni student must be. Finally, both of the characters sit there, blankly rotating their drinks as the uni student pinches another guy’s triceps on the other side of the bar.

After this, we’re wheelbarrowed into the daily routine of the troll; commuting to a soulless job, eating garbage alone, drinking Asahi, smoking weed, wanking over whichever 90’s actress his maudlin [throwback?] brain drags in that specific night. During the second wank scene, he tries an impossible name from way back, Natalie Wood or Bette Davis, and gets frustrated at the lack of results. That Cambodian witch is not Natalie Wood, he thinks, flicking a dirty nail at the naked image on his laptop, and then pivoting quickly to a forum where he searches for someone that irritates him in that specific moment. Stopping on a Nezuko avatar called HAPPYMESS, he proceeds to target them with gorilla pics.

The next day, he finds himself banned from the forum, but accepted by another – Kiwi Factories? – and for the next two, three hundred pages, he takes part in coordinated troll attacks involving fifty to hundred people [more like twenty, if you include sock accounts]. He has never felt this good, but the high lasts only about three minutes a day, and the rest of the time it’s just residue, the hope that someone with more than 10k followers might wade in, but this doesn’t happen. He’s stuck with nobodies calling him a ‘dickless gammon cunt.’

The following morning, the troll goes into town because there is no food or drinks in the RV. The sheriff Gene Freak takes him in his car and gives him a green hamburger. When he arrives in the town, the troll goes to the store and the owner offers him poisonous Nilbog milk, which causes him to feel dizzy. He goes to a chapel and finds his old uni friend, Arnold, who has since been transformed into a tree. The troll drags him out, but Creedence appears and uses a chainsaw to cut Arnold into pieces; the troll is then killed off-screen.

Meanwhile, in what you might call reality, the troll is forced to listen to a drunken theory from another enervated mess at work, this one about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Something like: ‘Angel would never get beaten up by some five two blonde, it’s ludacris. Muscle density is a thing motherfucker. All she does is whine about how hard she’s got it, hard how exactly? She’s middle class, gets to kill vampires every night, and she can’t even land the jokes right, messes up the punchline, wrong tone at the wrong time, women aren’t funny, sorry.’

We’re a hundred pages from the end now and the troll has reached a tipping point. Only he can’t figure out which way to tip. He’s irritated at the ranting guy cos he’s making points he would’ve made and now he’s got nothing to say back. But he’s also accessed a level of disgust for what this guy looks like – backwoods ugly, spits a lot when he speaks, has a gut – and can’t help but attach himself to the same abject image. But then he can’t let that happen cos it’s his current life’s work, so his brain breaks momentarily before scraping itself towards a third way: he will elevate his trolling to the abstract. Instead of insulting minor celebrities and/or authors with more than 10k followers, he will spam nonsense at them. Maybe random lines from Deleuze or Derrida, or worse, Heidegger. Or just pure unanchored lunacy. Then they’ll have no choice but to look at him like he’s intelligent.

It’s an unorthodox plan and for the next hundred pages he puts it into practice, entertaining himself for six minutes a day as some of the targets respond with huh? But then the old ennui resurfaces and drags him down. This is not enough, he thinks. Or this is humiliating, during rare moments of reflection. For a brief second, while watching a falcon claw at a telegraph pole outside his bedroom window, he thinks about both ending things and ending things for others in the local supermarket. But even that seems small now. So he pulls out his notebook and starts writing down a new plan of attack, this time two-fold. One, write lunatic horror novels and try to get them published. Two, make a new sock account and target publishers who say no.

In the last ten pages, he gets a call. His mother has died. Crying into a microwaved ravioli, he blames her for everything.

There, done.

Obviously, the ending’s a reach, maybe anti-climactic, but it would add a nice bit of weight to things, I think. Assuming all the other stuff I’ve written isn’t also a reach.

It probably is.

It has to be.

I just don’t know enough about online trolling to ground this spec. Closest I’ve come is forcing family members and surviving friends to create sock accounts to like my book on a writing website about 15 years ago. And getting them to give four stars to Ljubljana Witch on amazon. That’s not really trolling. But then I could be lying. No way to really prove I’m not. I could be THE troll. But I’m clearly not. Cos I don’t know how. But I could learn. If I weren’t writing all the time. Honestly, I don’t have the will or the patience for it. Couldn’t even stick to the second person gimmick earlier. But then I wouldn’t have to do anything that clever if I really wanted to be-

I wonder if the author went method for this book and tried trolling himself.

There’s no real need, I suppose. You can just lurk and take notes. Make the main character and his milieu as authentic as possible without stepping in.

But then, if you do that, the authenticity aspect, there’s no way you can tack on the ‘small act of violence in real life setting’ at the end, cos ninety-nine point eight per cent of the time it does not happen.

No, the troll should definitely go on trolling, with diminishing returns. But also a sort of joy in the potential of the next attack being…something…that people might actually talk about.

People being those with more than 10k followers.

Or a certain blog.

Hhhhhmnn.

I think this book might, in fact, be about writers.

Pieces of shit that we are.

Some of us.

I met one guy who was okay, wrote a book about a skeleton living underground, and there were other skeletons who had made a kind of monarchist-libertarian colony [??] that wanted to use his bones for something, but then I found out later that he was an Australian evangelist who thought suicide was cowardice and abortion meant-

You can buy Troll here.