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In Delilah S. Dawson's science fiction psychological suspense novel THE VIOLENCE, violence is a disease, and it's epidemic--literally. Suddenly, people start exploding in brutal, deadly violence--exactly like Robert Louis Stevenson's serum-crazed Edward Hyde or a werewolf. This Violence is like COVID, and it spreads in similar ways, person-to-person, then through American society. People who have it are quarantined. People who suspect themselves of having it self-isolate from their families behind interior doors. How much is this like COVID? The "epicenter of the pandemic" is Florida.
At first, people who contract it and pass it on to others aren't blamed--after all, it's an illness, not a moral failure. Then the situation gets more ethically complicated. The boilerplate and jargon that institutions like the CDC use to describe the Violence is exactly like the rhetoric of COVID. There are skeptics, too. There's also a run on vaccines that shoots the price up to ninety thousand dollars, but in October 2020, I'd have easily believed this a realistic vision of the near future and it actually happened during the last pandemic, as anyone who was an adult in the 1990s knows.
Our guide to this horror landscape is Chelsea Martin. A white suburban upper-middle class Florida housewife, she's trying to sell dodgy essential oils obtained as part of a Multilevel Marketing pyramid scheme that was supposed to make her financially independent. Like many MLM sellers, Chelsea has alienated her friends by grubbing for sales and now can't unload her product at cost. Her husband has always promised to add her to the mortgage but never did, and now his accounts, which she can't access because he does the finances, are mysteriously overdrawn. He has always been abusive, not only financially but emotionally, physically, and sexually. He's also a judge: does it get more Gothic than that?
Things change when Judge Martin is hauled away, suspected of having contracted the Violence. Chelsea and her daughter Ella know that his Violence isn't the contagious kind. Or is it? The Violence seems to impact people who are victims of narcissistic abuse and need to explode at someone. The Violence just makes them choose the wrong target. If this sounds a bit like FROZEN--women not in control of their destructiveness that mirrors that of society--you might be onto something. Chelsea and family have a dog named Olaf and Brooklyn is a fan of Elsa.
THE VIOLENCE shifts between various characters' points of view, but mostly clings to Chelsea. Anyone who has ever known a malignant narcissist will recognize the intergenerational trauma that seeps from Chelsea's toxic grandmother to her mother to shape her own adult vulnerabilities. Admittedly, Chelsea is also a cliche of endangered middle-class white straight womanhood, as are other major characters, like her mother, a toxic country-club denizen who looks fake-young enough to be mistaken for her daughter's sister.
The other protagonist, Chelsea's daughter Ella, has more agency. In high school girl, she has a boyfriend who is a creep, as do most of her friends, excepting the one who was raped by the assistant basketball coach and subsequently bullied out of school. She tolerates her boyfriend's abuse because her family and school have shown her no masculinities but the toxic kind. With this portrayal, Dawson courageously diagnoses American society with its very real misogynistic ills. However, when the Violence infects those she loves, Chelsea rises to the occasion, daring to try to break the cycle. Her memories of her familial past reveal a spark of determination that high school hasn't entirely snuffed out.
The premise of this novel is fascinating and the depiction of abused women's lives is harrowingly real, but for quite a while, it's unclear where it's going. Like the works of the Donatien-Antoine-Francois Sade (he preferred the title "Citoyen," not "Marquis"), THE VIOLENCE quickly devolves into an endless, sickening onslaught of toxicity and rage. But, as in Sade's fiction, in THE VIOLENCE that is a deliberate artistic goal. The messiness and repetition is a kind of realism, and as such has integrity.
When will we be sick enough of the violence to treat it as a pandemic, as a national emergency--and eradicate it like polio? What moral responsibility do victims of violence who project it outward have? Will Smith famously joked that people who have been traumatized don't have the right to "go around bleeding on other people," but what if the bleeding is involuntary, a symptom of family or cultural dysfunction? Horror writing by women has for a long time asked this question - going back at least to Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN--the famous classic Hollywood adaptation of which Dawson name-checks.
THE VIOLENCE is simultaneously riveting and emotionally hard to read, but with spots of humor, like jokes about Florida (Wo)man. It's a monster movie on paper and an important book that impressively tries to provide a disorienting new perspective on urgent, timeless, neglected problems.
§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and co-edits Reviewing the Evidence.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, January 2022
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