Author: Dinah Kolka

‘As it turns out, the stuff you choose not to think about is the stuff you should really be thinking about a lot more.’

Sometimes, your hand touches writing that feels so fragile and delicate, you are petrified of its weight. You immediately understand that you hold something deeply personal in your hands and with that comes a great responsibility. To write a review that truly captures it! How then can you capture something that can only be felt in the ache of your own bones? What if one wrong sentence in this review, one wrong turn of phrase from this second to the next, crashes what I held into the ground, smashed and gruesome, thereby destroying it in the process?

Needless to say, reading this book I felt an instant kinship with the author. Having written three full manuscripts of raw emotion, forever hidden and buried in the depths of my MacBook, I know a little of the mode of fictional confession myself. They will never get published. Yet Toxic Brodude  (hereafter TB) writes Libertine Dissolves as if it’s an exorcism, an exorcism that demands an audience. His pseudonymous moniker juxtaposes the novella well – the jarring distortion between his name and his body of work is haunting. Many times, upon reading it, I was worried it was some kind of marketing ploy: a quasi-autobiographical confession that is, in fact, a completely fictionalised account. But it’s real. This novella bleeds.

What makes this piece of writing so significant is perhaps its raw authenticity. It’s honest and unpolished. This serves a purpose – it allows the story to emerge that’s unedited and personal. Life doesn’t come in a manuscript we can meticulously edit and alter. Life is unpolished by design. The author doesn’t care for punctuation or proper paragraphs. The pages aren’t numbered, and there are no chapter titles. This work is a purification ritual, a regret written down and burned, a confession wrapped with a layer of indecent exposure. As a reader, we can only bear witness. The writer mercilessly forces you into watching when you should have your eyes averted. The shame is exposed, and it glistens in the puddle of drink and cum.

The story follows an unnamed protagonist, who, following his parents’ divorce, tries to find a space for himself in the world. Pursuing various pleasures, and moving from band to band and from one friend group to the next, we watch him develop from a teen to his late thirties. We watch as he narrowly avoids fame, a near-brush that he subconsciously squanders and ultimately proceeds to barrel towards a series of mistakes that will change his life forever.

What is curious, however, is the use of capitalisation for certain characters, such as Mother, Father, and The Best Friend. Never named, the author keeps a safe distance, yet these are the people who are fundamental to the author’s growth or lack thereof. As he himself states in the introduction: 

‘No names, no landmarks, only the man and God remain. Everyone else fades into anonymity, blurred by time and guilt. In the end, sobriety arrives not by will, but by grace.’

We don’t even get to know the protagonist’s real name. It’s as if we’re caged in his mind – always watching, but never learning — and this proves a useful storytelling device. For this novella is one lifelong drinking bender, one which aims to display a life of little substance, and when your life is all drinking and parties you often meet people only to forget them the next day. Women, for instance, are stripped of their meaning, and friends come and go, forever changing and coming and going. Even in the final chapters, we meet the narrator’s cousin – it’s the first and last time we ever hear of him. This works because, being honest with ourselves a moment, how many times have we had people in our lives who stood by us when things got bad but then vanished soon after, never to be seen again?

The story could be considered a bildungsroman – a twisted sort, for sure. We watch the character fall in love with alternative music, alcohol, and women. We don’t get neat, smooth transitions. What we do get is a Bible of Regrets, one in which TB masterfully shows that reality can be disgusting, vile, and imperfect. 

But there is lyricism in the ugly: ‘I felt like a wolf following a trail of raw meat that led into a breeding cage’.  The author crafts a very deliberate imagery when describing some of his most obscene behaviours. This was inserted when describing a scene when he is trapped by a woman who makes him cheat on his girlfriend. The author never puts up a pretence – he offers a layer of unrelenting truth, no matter the cost. This, however, brings some question marks. Is the truth only possible if hiding behind a veneer of anonymity? I will let the reader decide. 

Every now and then though, we are presented some small hope. The protagonist moves in with a girl, makes a life for himself, and goes snorkelling. However, these short positive elements are quickly succeeded by another barrage of wrong choices, made from numbness rather than from genuine evil. They are also often subverted. When the protagonist sits on a bench, after his first somewhat serious breakup, he is surrounded by vivid green grass. But he doesn’t find respite in the beauty of his surroundings – he experiences a severe case of derealisation instead.

“The thousands of different greens from the trees suddenly felt overwhelming, as did the gentle breeze rustling the leaves. They felt denser than they really were, and I could suddenly smell the damp bark and soil, rich deep earth. I felt like I was inside of an impressionist painting.”

Nature isn’t calming or even descriptive. It’s stifling, ‘overwhelming,’ and closing in. This subversion of nature as a mental state or a descriptive device is useful, as once again, it forces us to engage with the protagonist through the sheer act of witnessing. We don’t get to look at the trees and breathe in the scent of grass. The nature bites.

Saying that, there were quite a few points at which I seriously laughed. When the narrator described himself as looking ‘school shooter-esque’ my jaw dropped. But a lot of the time I genuinely felt for him, a man who doesn’t even attempt to be understood, a bottomless pit in his youth that realised his mistakes too late. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of the narrator was that he never took the time to stop to think. He simply took what was there, laid out in front of him. I didn’t get a sense that he robbed himself of opportunities; rather, he accepted all of them all too willingly without a second thought. We often see in literature about male loneliness a certain malaise and ennui. A sense of obligation to act, but a complete lack of ability to do so. But here, the protagonist throws himself into every pleasure offered to him, when in reality, he was the happiest creating and being far from humankind. His biggest mistake wasn’t the drink, heavy metal, or cheating. It was a failure to pursue the tranquillity he was yearning for. 

What’s admirable about the protagonist is his relentless commitment to creativity and transcendence. Despite everything, he kept searching, kept creating—even in his darkest hours. I particularly enjoyed his sentiment expressed below:

‘I’d later realise that what they were really congratulating was the act of performing, the motivation to learn the songs, and then step on a stage and play them. It was more about what we had done, rather than how we had done it, the choice of songs we had played, or how well we had played them, were inconsequential. Creativity of any kind is generally looked upon positively, regardless of what it is you are creating, even if it is distorted guitars and screaming.’

The sea of mediocrity cherishes the act of ‘doing something’ but never understands the message behind it. It’s a hobby, it’s a quirk – it is never a sharp knife that is meant to pierce. This book, in a way, serves as a way to recast this. It’s impossible to applaud and congratulate the sheer act of creativity if the words burn upon your touch and bring discomfort. In the act of witnessing, we have no choice.

But it was his special commitment to transcendence that caught my eye the most. The protagonist always searched for something, albeit ambivalently, but with clear instinctual awareness that there was something deeper that went amiss. He was never fully convinced if God was there (although the ending might put some question marks on that statement of mine), and yet, the need to search for him deeply ingrained within him. The chapter about the Abbey, when he chooses to pray was truly resonant. The author starts the chapter by explaining that it was incredibly difficult to write. I braced myself for another mistake, a loss of control, a woman that shouldn’t have been had. And yet, it was the chapter that was the closest to the deliberate act of choosing to seek out God. 

The only element that I feel didn’t work was an extensive description of the Nosferatu Woman. I felt like she received a lot of ‘post-mortem’ exposure compared to other women in the text. It is clear that she touched on something within the protagonist, and he felt hurt, rather than clear-headed. 

This book will not appeal to those who are looking for neat, perfect writing. This is no Dickens, no Nabokov. It’s postmodern absurdism filled with binge drinking, a carousel of women and sex, dead-end jobs, dead-end friendships, and life fuelled by numbness. It’s male Kathy Acker, it’s schizophrenic Fante. The author inserts a lot of shock value; however, it’s not to shock – it’s to confess, and sometimes a confession must be steeped in blood. The author throws any and all sensibilities and political correctness through the window – the novella swims with gruesome depictions of sloppy sex and graphic depictions of murder fantasies. In this quasi-American Psycho-esque fashion, he once again dares us not to look away. We are all evil. Toxic Brodude is just not afraid to admit it. 

I believe that there is a certain level of darkness in all of us, and sometimes, if we’re not careful, we let it take centre stage. This novella allows itself to explore the full extent of ‘mundane evil’ – and still chooses to offer us hope. Personally, I hope that the author found the catharsis he needed in writing this novel. I know I did in reading it. I witnessed the purification ritual and survived. And in the process, I found comfort for my own aching bones.

Libertine Dissolves is out now and available for purchase here.

Dinah is the founder of Decadent Serpent and a graduate of Edinburgh Napier University with a BA(Hons) in English Literature. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Salisbury Review and The Mallard. She was also published in the Scottish Book Trust’s 2018 anthology Rebel. In 2023, Dinah self-published her own collection of short stories, The Search and Other Stories.