“Soldiers are the best and the worst to stand beside you,” Torvald explained once. “Though their crimes might be particularly heinous, they usually acted so in consenting company. It’s likely they regret their actions, assuming they even acknowledge them. They’re trained and can follow orders. They’ve seen combat and won’t quickly lose their nerve.”
“And what makes them the worst?” Irdessa had asked.
“Ambition. If a man decides he can do my job better than me, there’s nothing stopping him from trying to supplant me.”

Whew- this was an unapologetic grim dark adult freshman debut. SFF Insiders picked this for a semifinalist, and I understand why they wanted us to experience this intense mental marathon.

The 631 page count is deceiving- I did rely heavily on the audiobook (32 hours) – so just go in knowing it’s more Islington and Hobb length. Could it been trimmed down a hundred pages or so? Yes. But some of my favorite dialogue nuggets were in the quieter moments.

David T List’s creativity felt like someone opened up a fire hydrant on a 90 degree day and the children are running around like mad.

I loved how strong the women characters were in this and how awesome their character development is (and could be in book 2). Like they may have felt they have drawn the short stick, but they are forces to be reckoned with.

Kale, a “failed” monk- really brings out the politics and magic systems. And though I can’t get my head fully around the limits of this magic system, is’s easy to love (and root for) his POV.

I think the biggest advice is go in knowing this feels like two books in one. Or maybe I wish this book was broken up in parts to help with the aggressive, chunky pacing. And I don’t say that because we have interweaving storylines and POV’s (because we do)- but because the first 7 chapters felt like a novella before the key story really kicked in.

Obsydia smiles at him and turns back to her bed. She walks slowly, adding a little bounce to her step to draw Kale’s attention to her ass. Once there, she bends at the hips and slinks onto her mattress on hands and knees. She won’t let her aching shoulder distract her from this interrogation.

Violence & Vigilance takes place in a world where the titular violence is plentiful and can happen to anyone at any time, and follows the (mostly) normal people who are trying to survive that. On two opposing islands we have the nation of Augsan and Fohrvylda, cultures of singing battle wizards and shark-riding gladiatorial barbarians, respectively, seemingly fated to go to war with each other someday. We follow groups of characters from each of the two islands as they try to survive the brutality the two immortal god-kings mete out on their own people, and uncover the secrets that got them all here.

The back cover of Violence & Vigilance tells us that the book follows gladiator Irdessa the Undying and failed monk Basalt Kale, which is a bit misleading. It follows events centred roughly around these two characters, but I wouldn’t qualify either of them as the main character. This book has 21 points of view that I counted (I admit I didn’t count that carefully so it could be more), though many of those are one-off perspectives, some from characters who appear just for that chapter or scene. I like that structure for an epic fantasy, it adds scope and depth to the world and lets you get different information and different ideas from people with different backgrounds. Having a huge cast is my favourite way for an epic fantasy to hook me. The perspectives in Violence & Vigilance are not all created equal necessarily; some of them feel a bit one-note for me, but many of them feel very distinctive and fun, and I enjoyed the switches between them, especially in the Augsan sections. I really liked the way that Kale moves through other people’s perspectives and we get just hints of what he’s doing most of the time. I found he was much more compelling that way and I actually kind of wish he hadn’t been a PoV character at all, because sometimes when we came back to him, it would then turn out that we actually hadn’t been following him because he wasn’t really doing anything interesting. It’s a smart decision to cut away from a character who isn’t up to anything and author David T. List does that really well in the Augsan sections, though in the Fohrvylda sections I noticed that he tended to cut away from Irdessa every time something interesting was happening. She’s a gladiator and commander of an armed force, and by my count, all but one of the battles that happened in the chapters following her cut away from her PoV and into someone else’s. I point this out because it highlights two main things that I found difficult about Violence & Vigilance.

First, I found a lot of things about the structure and pacing of this book a bit confusing. The world feels small in ways I don’t think it’s meant to. I’ve never read an epic fantasy that takes place on such a compressed timeline–every time I think weeks have passed, someone makes sure to comment that it’s one day later than it was ten chapters ago. Your mileage may vary on this, but for me that, combined with the fact that everyone always seemed to know each other or at least know the named characters because news was travelling so fast, really made the world feel smaller. Also reducing the scale for me is the issue I mentioned above. We tend to cut away from Irdessa’s PoV for battles, which in and of itself wouldn’t be a problem for me except that we often cut away from her just as she’s about to do something important, or only join her PoV after something significant has just finished. It’s most noticeable with her, but in happens throughout the book that a lot of stuff seems to happen offscreen or at a distance. It feels weird to say that because a lot of stuff happens in this book, but I often felt like List was skipping over important moments to keep the plot moving. We build up to a massive siege, for example, and then cut away and rejoin the characters after they’ve escaped and they tell us what happened in narration. It’s a very plot-focused book and that’s great, but to me the plot felt really disconnected because a lot of the big emotional moments and turning points seemed to be happening offscreen or in a different PoV. It felt like most times we rejoined Irdessa or Kale, their motivations or goals had changed because of things we didn’t see happen to them.

One thing I do really like about this book is that all of the conflict is ultimately about people’s petty vendettas and grudges with each other, which is a refreshing difference from the usual epic fantasy tendency to make the fate of the universe the stakes, but this tends to manifest in almost all the characters consistently behaving in ways that are irrational, and having huge changes of motivation or worldview that don’t make sense in the book’s timeline. for these reasons, I really loved Obsydia. She’s an evil sexy emotions wizard who is allergic to clothes and lives atop a tower where she sleeps in a giant clamshell bed and has servants sexily rub oil all over her, and who is gathering power for a coup attempt by making everyone want to have sex with her. She is my favourite character both because she is hilarious and campy, but also because she really felt to me like the main character at least of the Augsan sections. I didn’t count pages but she felt to me like the character with the most screentime, her actions drive most of that half of the plot, her motivations are clear and consistent, and she’s the only one who, from the beginning, wants something that is clear to me and is taking actions that are clearly designed to help her get it, and that are not counterproductive to her own goals, which most other characters are. She doesn’t quite feel like she lives in the same book as everyone else as they all reflect on how ruined their lives are as their feet bleed from all the running, and she contemplates the mango juice dripping onto her boobs and decides what to briefly wear today and whether to throw people she dislikes off her tower. Comedy is one of List’s strengths (the standout line in the entire book for me is Irdessa, after rifling through some clothes that are mostly made of lace and silk, describing the collection as a ‘whore-drobe’); Violence & Vigilance has some tonal discrepancies but it is at its best when it’s not taking itself too seriously.

Obsydia leads me to the other major reason why Violence & Vigilance wasn’t ultimately for me. I wasn’t hugely into how the book handles its female characters. There are three female PoV characters and all of them are kind of defined by their relationships or lack of relationships with men. Obsydia is cartoonishly sexual, Irdessa is wrestling with the death of a friend who she discovers was romantically interested in her, and Tivali tells the audience in narration how she’s not into sex like other girls but then immediately has sex with someone in thanks for saving her life. They are all strong and agentive in different ways and certainly none of them is “just” someone’s girlfriend (and Irdessa especially has way more going on than just that doomed non-relationship, including a moment where she reflects on what she perceives as some kind of asexuality), and I wouldn’t find any of their storylines problematic individually necessarily, but when they all happen in the same book and there are no other female PoV characters, it stood out to me in a way that I didn’t enjoy. List does do a great job of sidestepping a lot of the more problematic gender tropes you see in the grimdark genre. Rape is discussed a few times but it’s made clear in-universe that everyone agrees it’s abhorrent, and I appreciate that. There is a scene in which a man is raped, which is not my preference for how to fix that imbalance, but it’s a particularly horrifying scene that’s very well done. There’s not much in-world misogyny at all except from characters you’re obviously supposed to hate, and generally speaking we see women being soldiers, gladiators, wizards, etc. without it being remarkable to the other characters, so I really liked all of that background equality, which I think is super important. I just wish it had been reflected more in a greater diversity of storylines for the female characters.

It’s a bit hard for me to categorize Violence & Vigilance. It’s marketed as a dark epic fantasy, which are not two subgenres that merge often, which I find really interesting. It’s written in the present tense, which is an unusual choice that I actually quite liked. It’s a choice I wonder about; some of the book reads a bit like it was written in past and switched to present afterwards, and I don’t know if that’s true but I’d be curious to know what List’s motivation was there. I didn’t personally find it all that dark (it’s violent, which isn’t the same in my opinion), but I have a high tolerance for dark fiction. I found it more campy and funny than dark. The world feels really interesting and well thought out, and the background plot of the conflict between the two islands and the reasons for it are really cool. I had fun speculating about what was going on in the larger plot throughout the book and though most of my speculation was wrong I wasn’t unhappy about that.

List is destined to have a very passionate audience for Violence & Vigilance and its upcoming sequel. Something I haven’t mentioned is that this book is clearly very inspired by video games, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who’s into JRPGs, but also to anyone who’d like their epic fantasy to be about real people’s real problems instead of whether or not the universe is going to explode.

This is a sprawling epic fantasy I was excited to read because it’s a genre that is hard to find these days, and it is one of my favorite genres to read (and write). I was hoping to get a big book with a big world I could sink my teeth into. In the end, V&V wasn’t quite what I expected going in. The world is big, the cast is large, List’s prose is clean and elegant, and I would recommend listening to the audio, because the narrator does an excellent job. But the book never came together for me as a whole and I kind of hate that I had so many problems with it, because I really wanted to like it.

First, the good. Violence and Vigilance takes place in a rather unique world for epic fantasy, with one culture a sort of Wild West if there were also gladiators and it all happened on a northern island with Viking names, and the other, a southern country covered in jungle where an elite society of celibate magic-using monks keeps itself going by plucking promising children from their villages to be raised in a graded magic academy.

(Maybe you have seen some of these things in epic fantasy, but I haven’t seen them all together. Jungles are very underutilized as fantasy settings, and that was one thing I really did like seeing in the book, especially the realistic descriptions of insects and infections as the biggest dangers of these environments.)

List is also a good writer. I never stumbled and had to re-read to figure out what was happening because the prose made it unclear, and there were some POV sections which were genuinely, emotionally raw–the sensitive son manipulated emotionally and abused by his father; an injured and unsympathetic character facing his PTSD in the small details of daily life in a camp–which made him in those few paragraphs one of the realer characters in the book.

I do wish we’d had more of that kind of writing. The characters—and there are a lot of them, many of them in POV only for a scene or two–have very interior POVs for the most part, but the emotions we get from them are mostly large and not particularly nuanced–anger, fear, grief. They become part of the vibe more than anything particular to each character as a real, complicated human being, and the way each chapter functions almost like its own little self-contained vignette highlighted this feeling for me. I think that what I struggled with most. It’s not plot or character-driven; it’s a grimdark vibes book.

Usually when somebody says a book is all about the vibes, they mean low stakes fantasy or a gothic that’s all about the atmosphere, so I think if my feeling is correct, that makes V&V unique. My problem is that I’m not really a vibes reader. I kept trying to find cohesion in the plot as I read, and–my bigger struggle—to identify what the characters really wanted. But the characters never seem to have any real goals, nothing they’re deeply passionate about achieving (except Kraus, who is determined to protect Irdessa no matter what, but he was a side character). I’m the kind of reader who needs to be invested in the characters, but it was hard to get to know any of them because we kept shifting away into one-off POVs, often for those POVs to die.

(I have to be honest here; by the end of the book, that pattern disturbed me. There are so many brutal deaths, it’s like the reader is being constantly asked to derive their reading enjoyment from experiencing the deaths in POV and not from relating to the MCs as they struggle and grow. I doubt this is the effect the author intended; maybe it was the idea of evil getting its just desserts or maybe the goal was to humanize the deaths or just to wring out the reader’s emotions, but there is far more space devoted to the process of people dying than on moments of humans being human to each other, even in small ways. Even the one mostly consensual graphic sex scene is violent.)

To be fair, “violence” is right there in the title. But like my teammates, I got the feeling that violence was being used as a substitute for “dark”. This book is pretty campy, and I’m not criticizing that. The campiness was fun, although I did feel like Obsydia got a raw deal at the end. But there were multiple instances where a character’s actions could have led to real interpersonal and emotional consequences and both plot and characters would have gained some depth, but instead we moved on to more violence—and usually out of that character’s POV. I know that trying to define “grimdark” is asking for an argument, but I think the best definition I ever got was that in grimdark, regardless of how violent it is or how scummy the town, the actions of characters always carry consequences and consequences must be dealt with. That’s where the true darkness lies in a grimdark book. I think in, V&V, the violence functions as a sort of grimdark aesthetic that tries but doesn’t always mesh with the campiness.

I also had some problems with the way the world was presented, because in the end, I felt like it mostly existed in service to the vibe as well. I didn’t feel like we got the really detailed epic fantasy world that makes a big epic truly immersive. I had a lot of questions about Fohrvylda especially, which seemed to be a whole country based on nothing but gladiator coliseums except for a Wild West patrol of shark-horse riding enforcers. (I have to confess I got hung up on the orcanes: what does a shark-horse look like and what kind of an environment produces that kind of adaptation? But that says more about me than the book!) Even not-very-geographical me had a hard time figuring out where all this stuff was in relation to each other. I didn’t understand that the two countries were involved in a long war until I read a review about 30-40% of the way in and was startled to discover setting up the war seemed to be the whole point of the book. I think the war situation only becomes explicit after the 50% mark, which felt like a long time to go before discovering what the book was about.

So, unfortunately, this book wasn’t for me. But if you are a vibes reader and you like listening to your books on audio, I heartily recommend finding it on audio, because I think the narrator does a fantastic job with the material.

“Where you’re going, pain flows deeper than the Faithless Sea.”

Violence and Vigilance is a multi-POV epic fantasy that combines grimdark violence with the camp and whimsy of JRPGs like the Final Fantasy and Xenoblade franchises. If that combination intrigues you, it’s probably worth at least checking out, especially if you’re also hungry for a more plot-focused story in a market saturated by character-focused works. Pettiness and vendetta rule the page in David T. List’s ambitious debut, and there are a variety of colourful characters and creatures to entertain. Although Violence and Vigilance is in no way a litRPG, in many ways its structure and approach to narrative and character have the feel of a videogame, and so I would also recommend it to readers who are primarily gamers.

I came to Violence and Vigilance hungry for a multi-POV, truly epic fantasy to sink my teeth into. It’s a genre I adore, but that I’m exceptionally picky about, and that’s relatively hard to find these days (at least on trad shelves). When V&V was chosen as a finalist, I was excited to have the excuse to pick it up. List’s prose makes for a smooth read throughout–it’s not the sort of writing that makes a big to-do of itself, getting out of the way so that the story can take centre stage. Nonetheless, every so often a line would stand out to me as particularly well-drawn (usually something funny, voicey, or full of vivid description). The story is essentially split between two plotlines. One follows a gladiatrix named Irdessa as she escapes her captors and flees to her hometown, and the second takes place inside a rigidly structured magic school on a semi-distant land and follows a seemingly failed magical student (Kale) as he uncovers the corruption that secretly undergirds his society. The two nations (barbarian and mage) bear a simmering hostility for one another, seemingly informed by an ancient grudge between their immortal(ish) rulers–the barbarian Vretos and the sorcerer Itemrus. Irdessa and Kale’s POVs are joined by a bevy of others–some recurring and some unique. Irdessa’s storyline bounces from fight to fight, and for the most part encompasses a series of battles as she and her companions attempt to escape Vretos’s forces. This struggle is interspersed with chapters from the perspectives of Vretos’s conniving generals and other politicians. Kale’s supporting cast includes a diverse array of magical politicos, oppressed citizens, and fellow magic trainees.

The POVs in V&V are quite distant in comparison with current fantasy trends, which may delight or dismay depending on your particular reading tastes. Unfortunately, there’s also a slight bland saminess to the voices of much of the cast (especially its two leads). Adding to this issue, Irdessa and Kale’s POV chapters grow increasingly sparse as the novel progresses, and often scenes that feel central to their emotional and narrative arcs are told from the perspective of one-off observers, so that the reader is robbed of the emotional payoff one would expect. This happens with enough frequency that I assume it was an intentional choice, and though I’m intrigued by that choice, it does dampen the impact of potentially climactic or emotional scenes. Similarly, important moments that ought to provide an opportunity to deepen Irdessa’s characterization or story often take place off-page and are communicated in retrospect, so that we’re often not with Irdessa as she actively experiences important victories, losses, and narrative developments. There’s a sense with Irdessa in particular that her reaction to her situation changes according to what the plot demands of her, rather than being informed by her experiences or backstory. Characters frequently make baffling, self-defeating choices that read less like a manifestation of self-destructive tendencies, and more like plot conveniences to allow the story to progress to the next planned plot point. That said, certain characters also leap off the page and it’s clear List had a ton of fun writing them–Kraus, a crass drunk who’s been framed for rape by a corrupt police force and who clearly has a thing for dommy women; and Obsydia, an archetypal seductive sorceress who spends most of her time feeling herself up and pushing random men off the top of the tower where she hangs out in a giant clam shell. That both of these characters–along with a deadly species of murder chocobos called “dreadhops”–occupy the same story as descriptions of sexual assault by battle-axe should give a sense of the different tones List is playing with.

I did, unfortunately, have a hard time connecting with V&V. I’m always excited when an author takes big swings, but here the different ingredients that List combines never quite cohere. From the novel’s opening chapters, which largely take place inside a gladiatorial arena, it’s clear the reader is meant to take the book very seriously as a work of gritty realism, yet the campier, more fantastical elements routinely undermine that same realism. It’s a shame, because as I wrote to another judge, I do think List writes both cruelty and camp exceptionally well. Scenes that stood out to me include the POV of a man reduced to a shell of himself after experiencing brutal, off-page torture, and an embittered son’s reflections on his fraught relationship with his villainous father. There’s something real and emotionally honest in these that’s missing from many of the other characters’ perspectives. I also enjoyed the campier side of the book, and would absolutely read something by List that fully committed to the delightful silliness we catch glimpses of through Obsydia. There were jokes that genuinely made me smile, and dark moments that made me cringe, it’s just that neither of these totally works with the other.

Though it’s clear List has put a lot of effort into the magical side of the worldbuilding, the cultural and geographic context of that world is unclear for large portions of the book (Irdessa’s country seems at first to be analogous to the early medieval period, only for characters in her hometown to be shown wearing tweed suits, bonnets, and polished dress shoes–it’s the kind of juxtaposition that works fine in a JRPG, perhaps due to the visual emphasis of that medium, but that feels muddled and underexplained here). I’m a reader (and author) who cares very little about the technical details of time or distance, yet even I was left confused about how far away the different locations were from one another, as well as how the two nations related to one another (and how big the world was outside of them). Part of this is likely my own failure, as epic fantasy tends to lend itself to a perspective of world that’s very big, and so I went in with some assumptions in terms of the scale of the georgraphy. Assuming that Vretos’s realm was very large and populous, it therefore seemed peculiar that he was so fixated on recovering a random group of gladiators and that his generals would be so fixed on chasing Irdessa across what I initially pictured as a vast continent. It felt very much like Vretos’s interest was due to some external knowledge that Irdessa was the main character, than anything rooted in the world itself. Similarly, in Kale’s storyline, his travels away from and back into his magical city seemed to take very little time compared with what I’d been picturing, giving the impression that he’d perhaps been loaned Littlefinger’s jetpack. Again, much of this was due to my own false assumptions about scale, but it does also speak to a lack of core context that is perhaps more essential to the reading experience than the details of a magic system.

The structure of V&V is also a little clunky. Though I enjoyed the POVs of two clearly-doomed early characters in Irdessa’s story, the initial gladiatorial scenes stretch on either too long, or are not explored for as long as they need to be to establish the context of the world, the deeper stakes, or the book’s tone. Often, there’s little sense that Irdessa (or, to a lesser extent Kale) have individual needs, wants, goals, or other types of motivation. This leads to a problem both with character and story–it feels plot-focused because the characters act in order to progress the plot, but since Irdessa and Kale are mostly reactive, there’s not much plot direction. While Kale’s storyline does include some satisfying and curious twists and turns, Irdessa’s feels more or less composed of things just happening. Later chapters suggest that we’re intended to read her story as the progression of her development into a leader, but it’s unclear why her supporting cast view her as one.

Violence and Vigilance is ambitious, and David T. List creatively combines aspects of different fantasy subgenres that you don’t often see together. There were many individual moments that I genuinely enjoyed, and I would read a different book by the same author, as I think there’s a lot of talent on display in V&V. Although I found it a little messy and underconsidered, it also clearly has its audience and I do think List is one to watch.