'Vigilance' Imagines A Chillingly Familiar Future
Reports of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso have dominated the news in recent days; Robert Jackson Bennett's novella Vigilance draws a direct line from today's America to a bullet-riddled future.
Robert Jackson Bennett has a wicked sense of humor. His 2013 novel trained a satirical eye on small-town America even as it straddled the boundaries of science fiction and horror. Yet with his latest work, a novella called , the Austin-based author and two-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award tackles one of the most deadly serious — and sadly relevant — topics of all: mass shootings. As in , there's both science fiction and horror in. There's also that wicked Bennett sense of humor. He spares no disturbing absurdity or twinge of cognitive dissonance in his examination of gun mania and the new normal of everyday massacres in America.
