Dave Fitzgerald (Author of Troll)

Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing Female Loneliness Epidemic by Danielle Chelosky	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I turned 42 a couple weeks ago (and Spotify Wrapped thinks I'm 67). I have had exactly one romantic relationship with a person I met on a dating app (OK Cupid, for about 3 months, some 13 years ago). I don't game (or use game as a verb). I hate almos ...more
Dec 08, 2025 12:46PM · 2 likes · like · see review
Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing The Butcher of Nazareth by David Scott Hay (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I can be a bit like Charlie Brown with the football when it comes to fictional reimaginings of the New Testament. No matter how many times I'm disappointed, it's a conceptual template I continue to seek out, hoping against hope that the next one will ...more
May 16, 2025 06:51AM · 7 likes · like · see review
Dave Fitzgerald is now following N. Poe and Max Restaino
Apr 11, 2025 07:02AM
Dave Fitzgerald and 2 other people liked N. Poe's review of Troll: "I like to thank the narrator of TROLL for articulating my disdain of the sitcom "Friends" far better than I ever could. "
Apr 11, 2025 05:09AM · see review
Dave Fitzgerald liked Jack Houghteling's review of Troll: "I kept thinking about pain and guilt - traits of pathogenic size and ubiquity that sit so close to one another and yet vector into such variant directions of the unknown – when reading Fitzgerald. He’s capacious, he’s hilarious, he takes seriously an" Read more of this review »
Apr 03, 2025 02:08PM · see review
Dave Fitzgerald liked Christopher Sarvis's review of Troll: "“The most anyone can hope for is to be heard above the squall for a week, a day, an hour, before the world scrolls over to the next-big-thing. It’s not something you can reverse, this lemniscate, backchannel exchange of ego and id social media provid" Read more of this review »
Apr 03, 2025 02:08PM · see review
Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing Suspect by Gina Tron (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Good Lord. Gina Tron has been through it. I'm not gonna lie, this one hit close to home. Not so much, as I originally expected, for the school shooting angle, as for Tron's cleareyed recollection and pitch perfect recounting of what it was like to be ...more
Mar 21, 2025 07:52AM · 6 likes · like · see review
Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why by Sady Doyle	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing Waste by Eugene Marten	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Mar 21, 2025 07:40AM · 1 like · like

Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing

Female Loneliness Epidemic
by Danielle Chelosky

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I turned 42 a couple weeks ago (and Spotify Wrapped thinks I'm 67). I have had exactly one romantic relationship with a person I met on a dating app (OK Cupid, for about 3 months, some 13 years ago). I don't game (or use game as a verb). I hate almos I turned 42 a couple weeks ago (and Spotify Wrapped thinks I'm 67). I have had exactly one romantic relationship with a person I met on a dating app (OK Cupid, for about 3 months, some 13 years ago). I don't game (or use game as a verb). I hate almost everything that's happened to hip-hop post-Migos. I own my home. My knees hurt. I'm tired. All of which is to say that, while I still often feel like a young(ish) person out in the world, I'm not so delusional that I can't accept and admit I no longer understand what it's like to be one. Not really. Not under these brainrotting conditions. Not in these doomscrolling times.

Danielle Chelosky however, more than any other artist I know, is doing the maryjanes-on-the-ground work of capturing that feeling for all of us. This is not a writer interested in further handwringing over, say, the patriarchal pervasion of internet porn and its influence on modern sexual proclivities, or who sees the climate crisis and late-stage capitalism as still-escapable threats to be heroically combatted and solved. This is a writer to whom these things are already happening; for whom they are settled reality and pretty much always have been; things simply to be navigated and experienced; observed and reported.

Yet conversely, in eschewing the ADHD poetics and evaporative slang of her online in extremis peers, Chelosky's compact, nut-punch sentences also transcend our (increasingly, weirdly) tribalist generational divides, and notch the brain like stick-and-poke tattoos. Her nervy, anti-filtered dispatches from the blackout drunk heart of her reckless youth find literary ballast in the vaguely hopeful nihilism of everyone from Sylvia Plath to Charles Bukowski; Erica Jong to Mary Gaitskill to Michel Houellebecq. She's the voice of a generation that fully understands there's no such thing.

If Pregaming Grief was about Chelosky figuring out what she wanted, Female Loneliness Epidemic is about what it means to go out and get it. These stories are by turns funny and harrowing, sexy and grim. Sometimes the scariest thing a woman can be is honest. About her desires; about her disgust; about all the things she, and centuries of women before her, demurely chose not to say. Chelosky possesses a unique gift for this kind of radical honesty - for writing about being young and lost and fervent and free in ways that help us fusty 42-cum-67-year-olds better remember what it was like back then, and better understand what it's like now. I'm grateful for her candor. It's our fucked up world after all. She's just out here living in it. ...more

Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing

The Butcher of Nazareth
by David Scott Hay (Goodreads Author)

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I can be a bit like Charlie Brown with the football when it comes to fictional reimaginings of the New Testament. No matter how many times I'm disappointed, it's a conceptual template I continue to seek out, hoping against hope that the next one will I can be a bit like Charlie Brown with the football when it comes to fictional reimaginings of the New Testament. No matter how many times I'm disappointed, it's a conceptual template I continue to seek out, hoping against hope that the next one will be the one that connects. As such, when David Scott Hay first sent me The Butcher of Nazareth, I was both excited (as a fan of both the form, and his previous work), and a little worried (as a reader already let down by the more famous likes of Philip Pullman and Christopher Moore). But fear not, brothers and sisters - followers of the good books - for I bring you glad tidings of great joy. This one is rad as hell.

Now full disclosure, I ended up writing the introduction for this book, so I'm necessarily biased, and much of what I have to say about it went into that work (which I hope you'll all read). But still, speaking strictly as a reader, The Butcher of Nazareth is a wicked good time. Revolving around Titus, a man conscripted into Herod's mass infanticide (here dubbed "the culling") and subsequently plagued by visions of the future apocalypse he believes will result from that project's failure to eliminate the Christ child, this is a dark, deft, and at times sinfully clever traipse across the shifting desert sands of myth and history in which he sets out to finish the job (with a bigass goat in tow).

In the hands of a lesser author, this whole idea might well have resulted in a one-note polemic against the church, or worse yet, a string of mindless, naughty boy sacrileges, but Hay takes great pains to imbue his characters, both real and imagined, with nuance and depth. His depiction of the young Jesus as a potbellied hippie frolicking with his beloved Mary Magdalene feels sweet and sexy in ways even Kazantzakis wouldn't dare, and in contrasting the small, lunatic horrors of Titus's damaged psyche with the rampant, global horrors still being wrought in the name of a corrupt, crusading religious movement, he offers us a vessel for all our lost and broken faiths.

These characters sense their own importance - their place at the dawn of something bigger than themselves, and The Butcher of Nazareth uses them to ask big questions - namely, would the world be better off if someone had just smothered baby Jesus in his manger? - without insisting on solid answers (as all good Biblical speculation should). And while I've still got a few more Charlie Brown kicks at the New Testament football in my reading plans for this year (Robert Graves, I'm lookin' at you), I feel confident in saying that no one will ever approach the greatest story ever told quite like David Scott Hay. At the risk of a little naughty boy sacrilege myself, I'd say he fuckin' nailed it. ...more

Dave Fitzgerald is now following N. Poe and Max Restaino

Dave Fitzgerald and 2 other people liked N. Poe's review of Troll:

"I like to thank the narrator of TROLL for articulating my disdain of the sitcom "Friends" far better than I ever could. "

Dave Fitzgerald liked Jack Houghteling's review of Troll:

"I kept thinking about pain and guilt - traits of pathogenic size and ubiquity that sit so close to one another and yet vector into such variant directions of the unknown – when reading Fitzgerald. He’s capacious, he’s hilarious, he takes seriously an" Read more of this review »

Dave Fitzgerald liked Christopher Sarvis's review of Troll:

"“The most anyone can hope for is to be heard above the squall for a week, a day, an hour, before the world scrolls over to the next-big-thing. It’s not something you can reverse, this lemniscate, backchannel exchange of ego and id social media provid" Read more of this review »

Dave Fitzgerald rated a book it was amazing

Suspect
by Gina Tron (Goodreads Author)

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Good Lord. Gina Tron has been through it. I'm not gonna lie, this one hit close to home. Not so much, as I originally expected, for the school shooting angle, as for Tron's cleareyed recollection and pitch perfect recounting of what it was like to be Good Lord. Gina Tron has been through it. I'm not gonna lie, this one hit close to home. Not so much, as I originally expected, for the school shooting angle, as for Tron's cleareyed recollection and pitch perfect recounting of what it was like to be a teenager in the years defined by Columbine and 9/11. There was something in the air - a rising miasma of ambient, commercialized dread that could feel, at times, almost sentient (and has definitely achieved a degree of hivemind autonomy in the decades since). It was inescapable, and for Tron, it meant getting swept up in an overreactionary wave of smalltown paranoia after she and a friend left a joke death threat on their bully's car and signed it stupidly (sure), immaturely (no question), but also very much regrettably (they could have no idea how much), "Love, the Trenchcoat Mafia."

They didn't mean it. Like, of course they didn't mean it. They were just dumb teenagers being dumb. It seems absurd, looking back from our present climate in which empty death threats are flung around the internet by the thousands every day and no one bats an eye, that anyone could have thought for a moment these two were a danger to anyone. But having also seen firsthand what the aftermath of such an incident can do to a community (I am a survivor of the first post-Columbine school shooting - one month later to the day - Heritage High School, 6 wounded, no dead), I was honestly not surprised by a single development in Tron's harrowing tale of smalltown pariahship. In less than two years, both high school, and America had became suddenly and irreversibly less safe. People were angry, and afraid, and many were out for blood.

By drawing on her own diaries (let this be a lesson to all you budding writers out there - keep a journal - your crazy teenage thoughts could someday be invaluable - I wish I'd done it more), Tron recaptures her daily life in a way that feels as real and fresh as a self-inflicted wrist wound, to the point that I regularly caught myself picturing her in my mind's eye wandering my own high school's parking lot and halls. Likewise, her attention to fashion and pop cultural details brought so many memories screaming back to me in all their cringeworthy glory that I had half a mind to go burn my yearbooks on the lawn. Not only was the now-so-ubiquitous-we-don't-even-think-about-it trend of brand logo t-shirts just starting to turn us all into walking billboards, but at this same time corporate America was also figuring out how to finally commodify the long-separate bastion of the counterculture; to corner the final market on idividuality.

If 80's and early 90's teenagerdom was often reduced to a class war between rich, popular kids who listened to Top 40 radio and shopped at the mall vs. weird, poor kids who watched MTV and shopped at K-Mart, then the chief project of the late 90's and aughts was to make sure we all had expensive places to design and outfit our budding senses of self (and ready-made popular music with which to soundtrack them). Tron's heartfelt devotion to goth culture - Delia's and Hot Topic; thick mascara and spiked dog collars; Korn and Marilyn Manson - and her certainty that these corporate chains and mass-produced provocations could function as meaningful signifiers, indicative of her pain and rage and misunderstood, outsider authenticity (none of which is to suggest I was immune by the way - for me it was Rage Against the Machine and Tool and several years of spiked blue and black hair that I feel 100% positive contributed to my premature baldness), drives home again and again the countless ways in which anyone currently under 45 has pretty much had both their personal identity, and their insecurities about same, monetized and sold back to them from the moment they were old enough to receive an allowance. We defined ourselves in opposition to one another - as much by what we liked as by what we decidedly didn't - and no matter what we chose, someone was always more than happy to take our money.

Indeed, it's always felt like a one-in-a-million confluence (or at least one-in-a-thousand) the way the end of the millennium also ended up marking the end of a certain kind of innocence for humanity. I am only a couple years young than Tron, and I still have fond, concrete memories of life before the internet, but I have friends just a year or two younger than me who simply don't. The cutoff is that sharp. And for the narrow band of people who experienced the cusp in this way - who grew up surfing the bleeding edge of the information age - there exists a shared understanding of ourselves as a generation of guinea pigs; the real-time test market for every new advancement in online life. Social media wasn't quite a "thing" yet, but kids went home every night and sent each other e-mails or chatted on ICQ and AIM about the news of the day - comparing notes and spreading gossip at a faster clip than ever before - ushering in and normalizing the now fully-integrated panopticon in which we all now live. With the exceptions of a few major, monocultural celebrity scandals, a person couldn't really get "canceled" by society at large in the year 2000, but they damn sure could by their high school. The edgy, "too soon" humor of Tron's fateful letter, and the casual cruelty of proto-Karens like Sarah (the heinous frenemy-turned-tormentor to whom it was addressed) were just waiting for a platform to go wide, and there's no screen wider than the world wide web. One of the coolest things about Suspect is how, without really even trying to, it can't help but reflect back our present moment, and all the ways in which these nascent technologies weaponized millennials' worst youthful impulses, infecting everything with the simplistic, us vs. them dynamics of high school, effectively changing the nature of adulthood through us until it came to resemble something much closer to permanent adolescence (needless to say, this is not a phenomenon that has gotten better in the time since).

Tron, again unsurprisingly, received her death threat back 100-fold in the wake of her regrettable joke. From fellow students and adults alike. She was judged relentlessly and ostracized through graduation for this one mistake. She dealt with anger, depression, loneliness, alienation, and self-harm. She was barred from her prom, and by her own admission, was extraordinarily lucky to stay out of jail. These statements alone should serve to illustrate the climate. People should have known better, but they were angry, and scared, and out for blood. Though we've had dozens of statistically worse mass shootings in the 26 years since Columbine, it still remains in many ways the standard-bearer. We've made multiple movies about it. Everyone knows those boys' names. It genuinely did change everything; the starting gun in a marathon of violence that has, bleakly, tragically, grown and metastasized and been resignedly accepted as just another part of life in the United States. Tron, for her part, pretty clearly saw her life forever changed as a direct result, and has written extensively on the subject outside of this book. Her journalistic tenacity shines through as she peppers in fascinating statistics about the kinds of kids who commit these acts, the way other kids view and relate to them (both before and after; in real life and in the abstract), and the way they're covered in the media. As smart as it is heartfelt, Suspect cements Tron as a powerful voice in this ongoing and vital conversation. Though she didn't have to endure an actual school shooting, there's no doubt that she's a survivor too. I'm so glad she made it out, and found the courage to write it all down.

On a final note, for anyone interested to read more about my own school shooting experience (and a few of those Columbine movies) please check out my hybrid essay "Art for Our Lives" on Cinedump.com (link at bottom). I repost this semi-regularly - pretty much any time America faces another of these senseless atrocities, and America's leaders do nothing in response. I hope there will come a point when I never have to post it again.

https://www.cinedump.com/musings/2021... ...more