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A review by yevolem
Vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett
4.0
This novella is a satire about producing mass shootings for the purpose of profit and propaganda. This is a very American book, so I do wonder if non-American readers would be anything other than utterly horrified by how bleak it is. It's intensely political from start to finish and is without a doubt one of the most political works of fiction I've ever read. As to be expected from that, opinions will extremely vary depending on personal beliefs. I think anyone who tries to read this seriously rather than as satire will have a bad time regardless, though in different ways depending on how they interpret it. It's absurd, ridiculous, over-the-top, nonsensical, cynical, pessimistic, and by the end, melodramatic and unbelievable. It's very easy for me to see how this could be rated from being one of the worst to the best a person has read, or why they'd absolutely refuse to read it. There are so many different probable emotional responses.
Active shooters are recruited and paid to livestream their massacres. A bit more than a year after this was published the Christchurch mosque shootings were livestreamed. Those being shot are paid many times more if they kill the shooter. Basically everyone has a gun on them at literally all times because they know at any moment someone could try to shoot them. If the shooter kills everyone, they are paid many times more.
Mass shootings aren't defined within the text, though it notes that "It was the 514th mass shooting of 2026 that had spawned the idea". According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of today, December 13th 2021, there have been 667 mass shooting in the United States in 2021. So, depending on the definition, the author may have undershot his target projection. Mass shootings were only a bit more than 1% of the gun deaths in the US in 2021, which is estimated to be around ~42k, more than half of which are suicides. Their salience comes from how public they are and who the victims are. The primary purpose of a terrorist attack is to create terror and they do that very well. That being said, gun deaths aren't even half that of drug overdose deaths, which exceeded 100k in 2021 in the US. And drug overdose deaths are only a small fraction of...but I digress. Many of these deaths can be categorized together as "deaths of despair". If nothing else, that's what this novella is about, deaths from despair wrought by fear.
By the time I was 15%/~20 pages in I was already laughing so hard that I was crying. I was thoroughly amused from start to finish. A typical reaction seems to be to feel disgusted, queasy, even nauseous, and quite disturbed. If I could take it seriously, maybe I would've felt like that, but as it was, I didn't at all. It was easy for me to overlook all the narrative flaws because this is about the author's raw emotional distress being used to portray a certain mood and worldview rather than so much a story.
Active shooters are recruited and paid to livestream their massacres. A bit more than a year after this was published the Christchurch mosque shootings were livestreamed. Those being shot are paid many times more if they kill the shooter. Basically everyone has a gun on them at literally all times because they know at any moment someone could try to shoot them. If the shooter kills everyone, they are paid many times more.
Mass shootings aren't defined within the text, though it notes that "It was the 514th mass shooting of 2026 that had spawned the idea". According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of today, December 13th 2021, there have been 667 mass shooting in the United States in 2021. So, depending on the definition, the author may have undershot his target projection. Mass shootings were only a bit more than 1% of the gun deaths in the US in 2021, which is estimated to be around ~42k, more than half of which are suicides. Their salience comes from how public they are and who the victims are. The primary purpose of a terrorist attack is to create terror and they do that very well. That being said, gun deaths aren't even half that of drug overdose deaths, which exceeded 100k in 2021 in the US. And drug overdose deaths are only a small fraction of...but I digress. Many of these deaths can be categorized together as "deaths of despair". If nothing else, that's what this novella is about, deaths from despair wrought by fear.
By the time I was 15%/~20 pages in I was already laughing so hard that I was crying. I was thoroughly amused from start to finish. A typical reaction seems to be to feel disgusted, queasy, even nauseous, and quite disturbed. If I could take it seriously, maybe I would've felt like that, but as it was, I didn't at all. It was easy for me to overlook all the narrative flaws because this is about the author's raw emotional distress being used to portray a certain mood and worldview rather than so much a story.