The Violence was heckin dark and delicious. I could not put it down. A wild adventure into, dare I say, speculative fiction aspects will leave women crowing for more.

If you’re not too scarred by the trauma of the COVID pandemic, and you are into pandemic stories, look into The Violence by Delilah S. Dawson. The Violence takes place a few years after the COVID pandemic. There is a new viral pandemic that causes the infected to go into hypnotic states of rage, attacking anyone around. When I initially heard about this book I was intrigued by the concept of this disease. This concept and the book’s cover made me think that I would be reading a scary dystopian thriller. However the novel focuses more on the development of the characters- Chelsea, a mother of two who is in an abusive relationship, her teenage daughter, Ella, and her mother Patricia. Each of these characters experiences a huge character arc throughout the book. These arcs are the best part of the book. The Violence’s character driven pandemic story reminded me of Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.

A large theme of this book is the struggle of domestic violence and the trial to overcome it. If you are not ready to read about graphic domestic violence please wait till you are in a better headspace to read this.

Great book with some tough scenes but really interesting. I enjoyed it quite a bit and it was a fast read.

The Violence grabs your attention from the first chapter, with somewhat classical characters in an abusive situation. As you keep reading, surprises and deviations from the "normal" story start appear and make you eager to continue reading. The ending was a real surprise! While certainly violent, this story is equally about the characters and the choices that they must make.

Wow wow wow! That was totally not what I was expecting but in a good way. The writing of this book was great and really keeps you engaged the whole book. I didn’t feel like it was 500 pages at all. You connect with the characters and the story line is crazy. It definitely a violent book, haha. I loved it and can’t wait for more by this author. Thanks NetGalley for this advanced copy of this book.

This is a deeply affecting, visceral book. It is not a pleasant read, and it's not supposed to be, and for that reason – along with the fact that plot is not really a major engine of the narrative, and the way the switching POVs sometimes pulled me out of the story – I found it a little difficult to get through. But it's a strong, well-told novel for sure, with a lot to say about power dynamics and womanhood, and I enjoyed the catharsis of the ending. Would recommend.

I received an e-ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Don’t take the trigger warnings about abuse that open Delilah S. Dawson’s The Violence lightly. This is a novel about abuse and abusive families in no small way; indeed, one can’t help but feel like the writing of this book had to be therapeutic for Dawson to write, finding a way to marry an examination of abuse and its effects with a high-concept premise – in this case, the emergence of an epidemic of horrific violence, as people explode into horrific spells of brutal assault, only to “awaken” moments later without any memory of anything that happened.

The connections there are obvious, and in the back half of the book, Dawson finds ways to thread all of it together in rich, compelling ways, exploring her three characters – a wife escaping her abusive husband; her daughter, on her own as the pandemic spread; and their mother/grandmother, a woman whose efforts to escape her lower class lifestyle have left her unapproachable and distant – and the various ways that violence has affected their lives. Indeed, as the book develops and evolves, Dawson finds way to explore their trauma in interesting ways, eschewing direct parallels in favor of letting the genre trappings handle some of it, whether via empowerment fantasies writ large, reminders of what matters in life, or finding people that can be trusted after being mistreated for so long. Really, the bigger the pandemic gets, and the more spread out her characters get, the better Dawson does at drawing you into her world and playing with her ideas, pulling it all together in a satisfying ending that gives you closure for the characters and helps you see them finding the same.

All of which makes it all the more frustrating how unpleasant, preachy, strident, and just plain unlikable the first quarter of The Violence is, giving you a book that’s going to drive off a lot of people, and honestly had me questioning whether I wanted this to be the third book I’ve ever bailed on in my life. It’s hard to know where to begin here, but it should probably be with the absolutely unlikable characters on every single page; while the mother and daughter get our sympathy by virtue of their abusive life, the grandmother/mother figure is hilariously, painfully awful, essentially being Jessica Walter’s Lucille Bluth except more so and not played for laughs. Her character is implausible and exaggerated into extremes, becoming a cartoonishly “evil” figure that makes it hard to take the more grounded and horrific abuse situation as seriously. Also not helping: the slew of male figures in this first section of the book, who often come across not as believable predators or misogynists, but as figures from a bad Lifetime movie, reducing the serious and real issues under discussion here to cartoonish one-dimensional figures. (The high school principal here is the one that broke the camel’s back for me; there’s a way to handle that material that doesn’t veer into mustache-twirling, but this ain’t it.) And none of this even gets into the lack of subtlety of the book in this early going; even as someone who agrees with the book’s points, I was rolling my eyes at the stridency of it all.

The beginning of The Violence is just a chore, plain and simple, with badly drawn archetypes, no characters to latch onto, a preachy and thudding tone that left me irritated, and more. The book gets so much better from there as it goes, with some genuinely interesting ideas…but they’re not good enough to bother muscling through that opening. I wish I could say otherwise; there’s a good book in here (indeed, I wonder if you could start after that opening stretch, and let the book handle its backstory through alluded statements and implication), but it’s not good enough to make it worth the frustration of the early sections.

This is a story about survival.. and what lenghts you will go through to protect your family and yourself..
When a disease called the Violence that causes moments of blinding rage, usually leading to someone being beaten to death, sweeps through the nation. Chelsea realizes that this could be the perfect way to get away from her abusive husband..
However when she comes down with the Violence she knows that she also needs to keep her children safe from herself. She goes to her mother for help and ends up banished from her house without her kids.. So she sets off to find away to make some money, and get her mother to give her back her kids.
We see Chelsea grow and become someone she can be proud of. We also follow one of Chelseas daughters Ella, who is a teenager and ends up on her own trying to find her mother, and Chelseas mother Patricia who definitely wouldn't win mother of the year, but does agree to take on her grandchildren.. Her character probably shows the most growth in this story even though Ella was my favorite character. Not only did she also have to deal with her abusive father, and watch the toll it took on her mother, she also ends up on her own trying to figure out how to take care of herself and having to figure out where her mother is and how she can find her.

This was a good thriller that kept me guessing. I had no idea where it was going to go from one moment to the next. and I was really happy with the way it ended.

I appreciate the author providing the disclaimer/trigger warning because this was one of the most violent books I've ever read. I found a lot of the story to be repetitive (especially using the word Covid/referencing this pandemic on literally every page) and I didn't really connect with any of the characters. Some of it was predictable and recycled ideas, and the ending was too "fairytale" for a book of this violent nature. Not my cup of tea.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5.
First off, I want to thank NetGalley, Delilah S. Dawson, and the publisher for a free digital ARC of this book in exchange for a review.

This is the first novel I’ve read by Delilah S. Dawson, and I really enjoyed it. Ever since the COVID pandemic began, I often find myself wondering if there will be any books out there that acknowledge its existence, or the reality of the aftermath. When I watch tv shows or movies nowadays, I’m shocked they aren’t wearing masks on planes or in public until I remember that the show/movie either came out before the pandemic or the pandemic goes unacknowledged (understandable in fictional universes, etc). It was refreshing to read something that acknowledged this major life event we are all living through.
As a woman, I know how lucky I am to not have dealt with sexual, emotional, or domestic abuse, and yet I know that as I am young, I still may end up a victim someday. This book acknowledged the reality of the lives some women live, whether that’s feeling they cannot leave their abuse husband due to their kids, being neglected in a relationship or a relationship being conditional, being gaslit by someone who at one time seemed perfect, and so much more. Seeing how these strong female character struggled and grew to ultimately fight against their abusers was inspiring. Of course, most of this stemmed from the Violence, a disease which caused them to black out and kill the person they have their eyes set on.

The concept of the Violence, another disease taking the world by surprise so soon after the COVID-19 pandemic was an interesting one, and it really got me thinking. I felt that this story was very well written, and I look forward to reading more of Delilah S. Dawson’s work in the future. Thank you again for the digital ARC of this book!

Initially I assumed this book, set in present day post-Covid America, to be simply about abused people and their abusers during a subsequent global pandemic where instead of suffering respiratory symptoms the infected go on murderous rampages. But there was so!much!more! to The Violence than that! The characters who seemed rather trope-y to me in the beginning gained depth and traction as the story progressed; by mid-way through I was completely invested and cheering for mom Chelsea, Nana Patricia, teen daughter Ella and little kid Brooklyn. Once the plot left the confines of picture-perfect yet tension-filled domesticity, it flew into a glorious realm of the wackadoodle unmundane. It's slapdash and tongue in cheek, "she's not going to let an accidental murder stop her from getting her girls back"(!) but it's also full of fundamental life lessons about appearance vs reality, what constitutes a good marriage, basic human goodness, and stopping vicious cycles.

What great book to end my year on! This was not quite what I expected (I was thinking this would be more of a dark, dystopian, Handmaid's Tale sort of story). Instead, at its heart, it's very personal story about a family surviving domestic abuse (so, yes...trigger warning for that) and finding the strength to change during a pandemic of violence.

The author has lived experience growing up in a home with domestic abuse, and it shows. The descriptions of the family dynamic at play in The Violence are immaculately and compassionately rendered. It's a family dynamic that warps everyone who lives in it and that creates a very dramatic setting for the emergence of the violence pandemic.

I won't go into too many details, but I loved the stories about Chelsea's "found family" and how it serves as literal training ground for her to find her strength. In general, I thought ALL of the characters were lovely in this book. At first, Patrica seemed a bit cartoonish, but by the time the chapters were alternating between Chelsea, Patricia, and Ella, the book found a nice groove and depth, chugging along at a good pace, with lots of chapter-ending cliffhangers that keep you reading.

Normally I wouldn't be drawn to a book about a pandemic while still living in one, but I liked that The Violence was SO different that the author is able to use our current understanding of pandemic etiquette to apply to whole different (wilder) sets of circumstances. The reader understands how exhausted people in the book are about pandemic#2, are because we're currently exhausted by pandemic #1. We get the references to trauma and being pushed to the brink.

I'm sure there will be a small crowd that bristles at the references in this book to the Covid pandemic, (which the Violence pandemic quickly follows). There are mentions of a President who was impeached who bungled the Covid response, references to Covid misinformation, and parallels to the Covid vaccine rollout. If somehow you think of this time we are currently living in as a lovely one, then sure, you'll likely be offended by this author's take on our current pandemic. Hopefully my five stars will balance out your one star trolling reviews.

I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

When I had requested The Violence, I had no idea what to expect. I am familiar with the author, Delilah Dawson/Lila Bowen, and have read several other works. I enjoyed everything I read, so it is no surprise that I liked this book, but it is so very different than what I expected. So, what did I expect? Given the state of the world these days and her other books, I expected something more along the line of The Stand or the more recent stories like Survivor Song or The Wanderers. There is a virus, but unlike the aforementioned novels, the whole world hasn’t gone to hell and spiraled into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
There’s a passage in the book of a description of men who possess and abuse women. Damn! This book is powerful on so many levels. As I read it, I often thought of the pain relived by so many abused. The Violence proved to be a blessing and a curse. My hope is that the author and all those who have lived through abuse physical and/or mental, are able to escape and heal. Perhaps this book will be a start.

The book is brilliant. It is expertly crafted. The characters—mostly women— are rich and multi-layered like the story itself. There are certainly horrific scenes in this book, but it is a human story—one of survival and redemption. It should be on everyone’s reading list.

The Violence is so much more than I expected. Like many others, I was expecting it to be campy, while making a point. Instead it is a moving novel about a family of 4 women (okay, one is only 5 years old) who live through varying forms of violence every day, before the Violence pandemic hits the country. I liked all of the characters - they were fully realized and you find yourself rooting for different women at different points in the novel. This book definitely touches on domestic violence, but also the types of violence/self-loathing women inflict upon themselves and others in a a bid to survive.

"Chelsea Martin appears to be the perfect housewife: married to her high school sweetheart, the mother of two daughters, keeper of an immaculate home.

But Chelsea's husband has turned their house into a prison; he has been abusing her for years, cutting off her independence, autonomy, and support. She has nowhere to turn, not even to her narcissistic mother, Patricia, who is more concerned with maintaining the appearance of an ideal family than she is with her daughter's actual well-being. And Chelsea is worried that her daughters will be trapped just as she is--then a mysterious illness sweeps the nation.

Known as The Violence, this illness causes the infected to experience sudden, explosive bouts of animalistic rage and attack anyone in their path. But for Chelsea, the chaos and confusion the virus causes is an opportunity--and inspires a plan to liberate herself from her abuser."

Thanks to NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Anyone looking at Chelsea’s life would think it ideal. She is pretty, has two beautiful children, a fabulous home, lovely clothes, and a handsome husband. But remember the old saying that no one knows what goes on behind closed doors. Chelsea’s husband brutalizes her; he is abusive physically and mentally, breaking her down to the point she feels insignificant. And the thing that scares her more is that he has begun berating and harming their eldest daughter, Ella, too.
Chelsea feels trapped. With Covid last year, she felt like the walls of her home and her mind were closing in. This year with the newest pandemic, the VIOLENCE, she feels the continued isolation will drive her insane. She wants a way out of this marriage but where can she go? David, her husband, will never let her leave. It is not safe outside because of the VIOLENCE, but it doesn’t feel so safe inside the house either since David has taken to choking her until she passes out. Sooner or later, he will go too far and kill her. Then what will happen to her girls, Ella and Brooklyn.
The VIOLENCE is a horrible disease. It comes on quickly and quietly and when the violent urge is over, someone is usually dead. Chelsea is beginning to see the opportunity this presents. An opportunity to rid herself of David. Will she able to do it? What will happen next? Read on and see …

I really liked this book. It was well written and heartfelt. Any woman who has been abused mentally, physically, or both can understand Chelsea’s dilemma. Often the abuser has so isolated the victim, she feels there is no place to turn for help. Delilah Dawson has taken this social problem, made it into an interesting work of fiction, and added a fresh perspective on a solution.

Robyn Heil, Buyer for Brodart Co.

It was intriguing to read about a virus that was contracted through an insect instead of through people. True to the title's name, the book is very violent. Full of domestic, emotional, and sexual abuse. I don't think I was truly ready to read a novel about another pandemic happening after COVID had ended. All the triggers these ladies felt, almost triggered me.

Very will written novel. I was emotionally invested and rooting for Chelsea and Ella in their journeys.

First off, if you are triggered by vivid descriptions of domestic violence, this is not your book. Not every book is for every person. This has that and more.
Basic story, right after the Corona virus got through giving us Covid-19 and we were totally over being sick, a new virus popped up. It caused people to go berserk and kill whomever was in their path with no memory of having done so. It was spread by mosquitos. They spread enough bad viruses already, so that was possible. A vaccine was developed, but the formula was grabbed by an opportunist who patented it and charged $30,000 a dose. You only needed one dose, and it would both cure you if you had the disease and prevent it if you didn't. Not bad for one needle-stick. It turns out the cure is easy to make and some people are out breaking the law by making the cure and teaching others to make it and giving it away for free.
As for the story, we have three generations of women in a family we are following. There is Patricia, called Patty when she was a broke minimum-wage single mother. Her daughter, Chelsea, grew up positive her mother hated her. Chelsea married a man who abused her and her oldest daughter. Chelsea has two daughters, Ella, a senior in high school, and Brooklyn, only 5 years old. Ells didn't escape the abuse of men. Her father choked her and her boyfriend treated her like property.
The book's chapters follow these three women from the start of the Violence epidemic until its chemical end with the vaccine. I don't know if any of them would have studied their lives and made the changes they did without the virus changing their circumstances.
I have to say, I loved the book. It was a very easy read (but then I read zombie books whenever I can get my hands o a new one). There were even spots where I burst out laughing. Yes, there were places that were hard to read and made me feel sad, but not as many and I'm glad of that. I still feel, beyond feeding birds and fish, mosquitos have no good purpose.
I received the copy of the book I read for this reader review from the publisher on Netgalley.

Interesting material and ideas at play, but not all of it works. An illness that causes uncontrollable rage is an intriguing concept and Dawson does a fantastic job incorporating the horrors of domestic violence within the story. Although presenting the tale through three perspectives from three generations within one family is clever, Chelsea's point of view is consistently the strongest, while Ella's takes a while to get going and Patricia is presented as such a loathsome, unpleasant individual early on that it took me until nearly the end to finally warm to her. My biggest gripe is that at 500+ pages the book is far too long; it could have easily lost at least 100 pages and still retained a good flow.

This is the first DELILAH S. DAWSON novel that I've read, but I should point out that we have appeared in Project Insider, an anthology filled with comics, cats, and crafts.

Up front, the author presents a note of trigger/content warnings which includes a little of her own personal back story of abuse. As she states: The Violence includes physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and includes animal death and graphic violence. Some of these scenes may be distressing for some readers.

She was not wrong.

Chelsea:

Of the three protagonists, Chelsea Martin (sandwiched between her mother and her two daughters) immediately opens the books with the kind of marital abuse that made my heart feel like it was being tightened in a vice clamp. It got screwed tighter with each paragraph. Chelsea's husband David controls everything about their lives. He abuses her in every possible way. The world they are in is post-COVID but the new pandemic, a virus spread by mosquitos causes people to have blackout episodes were they are silent, yet primal. They will attack anything. Before it was even on the pages, I was rooting for Chelsea to get the Violence to give her husband some payback.

Chelsea is not only relatable to partners who have been abused, but also in her sense of loneliness and career failure. Since she was forced to be a stay-at-home mother, she tries what many women do -- MLM (multi-level marketing) schemes. In Chelsea's story, it's an essential oils brand called Dream Vitality, a satire on the real world brand Young Living. The only person Chelsea can remotely consider a friend is a woman across the street in their development, Jeannie.

[accordion title="Spoiler Alert"]Chelsea's arc takes a surprising turn when she joins a new amateur wrestling league which stages the everyday people to "storm," the word used to refer to a Violence blackout and rage. It's an all-gender league founded by an ex pro-wrestler who has his own inner demons. Since Chelsea can't afford the $30,000 to get the Violence vaccine, she shocks herself by auditioning for the Violence Fighting Ring. She goes from being a woman with no choices and no agency at all to being a role model for thousands of viewers.[/accordion]

Ella:

Ella is Chelsea's daughter and the main protector of her six-year-old sister, Brooklyn. Ella should be finishing high school in this apocalyptic southern United States world, but her life veers off course hard and fast with nowhere to run. Even when Ella thinks she may be safe under the grandmother's roof, she finds the abrasive, cold, and domineering environment as unbearable as living with her father.

Ella faces her own scenes of abuse from her boyfriend, her father, and her "uncle" Chad (a cop friend of her father). She has more moxie than her mother at the start. Where Chelsea takes the abuse from David (in order to keep him focused on her and not the girls), Ella doesn't take it lying down from her boyfriend. She doesn't fall for any of his apologies. She sees his one abusive moment as a sign of what could come having all the knowledge on the subject from watching what her father does every night to her mother.

If Chelsea is the person who can't escape, Ella is the person biding her time and counting down the minutes until she can. Ella is courageous beyond measure. She never thinks she's above living destitute and stealing food after scraping dead animals off of a floor. She wishes for comfort and safety, but she goes through her days knowing that if she wants it, she'll have to make it happen for herself.

Patricia:

This brings us to the matriarch Patricia. Her past is nothing but Florida white trash, uneducated, and waiting tables to meet the next man she can manipulate with her sex appeal. Readers get to be inside Patricia's head in the moments she experiences her biggest fears: reverting to piss-poor "Patty" again with no rich husband, no big house in a gated community, and saddled with responsibility. Patty barely raised her daughter Chelsea. The well-off version of herself, Patricia, has plenty of chances to come to her family's rescue.

Patricia's arc is classic soap opera pastiche! If you love to hate the soap villains like Erica Kane or Alexis Carrington, you will devour every scene with Patricia. She doesn't exactly come full circle, but she believes she has. There's no way not to avoid hoping she'll grow to be nurturing and loving towards her daughter and granddaughters. When Patricia mistakenly bans Ella from returning to the big, fancy house, Nana accidentally makes herself the primary caregiver of little Brooklyn.

Brooklyn:

This little girl is constantly protected by those around her. She witnesses terrible things that people always say a child shouldn't experience. It's likely that the extreme trauma all around Brooklyn will be repressed. She's the hope of the family, the delicate flame that people keep lit for warmth.

Story Structure:

Brooklyn's story is no less important even though she never gets to be the point of view character like the others. This is one fault I have with Dawson's breakdown. There are two chapters where readers are popped into other perspectives when it wasn't done through almost the entire book. We don't need the perspective of River, a young man that Ella meets with his friend Leanne. We don't need a chapter from David's abusive POV either. We get more than eighty percent through the novel and suddenly there's David's narration. It's not beneficial though more important than the rando River character. First of all, the book is long(ish) at 512 pages. Secondly, all the perspectives are from the women so shifting to non-binary River and cis/toxic male David, break that pattern in uncomfortable jolts. River is at least a good person, but even his friend Leanne would have made more sense to be part of the narrative since she's the brains of the operation to get the vaccine out to the poor and middle class.

Summary:

If you think you can handle spending a lot of time in a world of victims waiting for their story arcs to give them the pay out of having agency and satisfaction, then The Violence is fine for you. There were several times when I wanted to ditch it because it takes so long until any of these women catch the breaks they need. I was thrilled with the endings for each of them!

The book design credit is Caroline Cunningham, but I don't know if that's the cover designer. I bring this up because this US edition cover is brilliant with its blood red space and the butcher knife casting the shadow of a person. It's minimalist and eye-catching.

This will receive a lot of buzz equating it to The Power by Naomi Alderman, and rightly so. But what makes The Violence stand apart is while The Power looked globally and followed many stories, The Violence focuses in very tight on three generations of one family. Riveting.