Chris Dow

There are number of ways to ‘read' this text.

Is it awkwardly paced and poorly written due to inexperience, or lack of editing? Or is it terribly written in service of it being the diary of an obviously paranoid, recovering alcoholic? Is it method?

Is the book structured across three short chapters in order to fit a literary arc of setup, stasis and then payback / soft redemption? Or is it just a bit... y'know... lazy?

Are the constant appeals to prospective publishers semi-autobiographical? A mirror being held to modern publishing and the texts that do and don't get picked up? Or just a lazy plot device to further ground the story as amateur, giving it a free pass for its ugly delivery?

I think it's worth saying that those who seem to receive the book negatively wholly as a result of them not wanting to ‘side with the narrator' are not doing much to argue the case for media literacy in the 2020s. The lead is, if reviewed solely on their actions, a real shit, but there are enough nuggets peppered through the text to suggest unresolved trauma. The female foil of the text is also, if the narrator's account is to be believed, a real shit. You do know that you're allowed to engage with media without it being a tacit endorsement, right?

The book seems to flirt with the idea that it might tackle class, or explore where the worlds of art and advertising overlap or repel, or gentrification, or wider tenets of ‘modern masculinity', but nothing's ever given enough time. Again and again I felt myself completely unsure if the glimmers of good or interest were by design, or just accidental.

There are two more books in this series. I have no idea if they continue this story or move to other characters, settings and scenarios. If nothing else, the book made me inquisitive to what could follow this.

It feels like Antioch is largely unknown, which is a shame, because it's excellent. It's a zombie story - a post-apocalypse story - but not in a lazy, ripe-for-sequels, boy-we-hope-this-franchise-takes-off kind of young adult fiction way. This is much closer in tone to something like The Walking Dead comics, where zombies and the end-of-the-world setting are really just set dressing: a catalyst that allows the author to explore deeper, more interesting questions.

Does doctrine allow for situational improvisation? How do people of faith balance piety against pragmatism? Can we ever escape or outpace trauma? What drives us to act on emotion versus instinct? Where does life end and death begin?

The author describes Antioch as ‘low fantasy', but it feels far more literary in its delivery. Clever metaphor and careful character studies feed these questions to the reader organically rather than didactically. Alongside the larger themes, it's also a story filled with vivid action, layered characters, and a well-paced, wrap-around plot that moves seamlessly between location, faction, and time period as the narrative demands, without ever losing momentum.

It would be very easy, when writing a book like Antioch, to take the blunt, black-and-white route - religion is bad. But at no point does it feel like Harlan's preaching. Instead, faith is explored through a range of deeply human positions: it heals and it harms; it galvanises and it isolates; it creates meaning and it justifies destruction.

Antioch is a fantasy novel, but only ever in a genre-adjacent way. At its core, it's a book about faith, and how far those who believe are willing to bend, compromise, or break when belief meets friction.

This is not a very good book.

Viktor, the lead and the titular Villain for Hire, is a bad guy. Aury is clearly trying his hardest to write this bad guy as a subversion of superhero fiction expectation. He's an antihero, you see?

Except in order to remain likeable, Viktor's villainy is also increasingly explained away as being in service to the heroes who he truly respects. He's a paid foil. Which again, could have been an interesting subversion of hero and villain archetypes, exploring ideas of hierarchy or order.

But that subversion never really materialises. Viktor's attitudes towards the other players in the piece are so muddled that any sense of a coherent moral position collapses. You could argue that as the wider narrative progresses, the author is trying to build some sort of system of morality, but it's never in service of anything other than driving the protagonist to another power fantasy set piece or power fantasy sex scene.

Viktor is framed as a villain, but only so long as that framing doesn't threaten his likeability. His villainy is softened, redirected, or justified whenever necessary, which drains the premise of any real tension. What remains is not moral ambiguity, but convenience.

I know it's become incredibly fashionable, especially in the era of cheap eBooks and subscriptions, to leverage the MCU-ification of modern media to string people through sub-par narratives by way of inferred obligation. Villain for Hire feels like a product of that exact environment: a book that gestures toward subversion while relying on familiarity and escalation to keep the reader moving forward.

Perhaps the series' biggest strength is in being as overt as it is in its rendition of “super hero fanfiction with boobs”, holding a mirror to the entertainment industry more widely. Is this really what people want?

A short novella about about regret and acknowledgement. The narrator, primarily through observation of and friendship with a younger neighbour with learning difficulties, unpacks his life to that point.

As the year shifts, in narrative, from 1999 to 2000, there's quiet reflection that, despite fearmongering of Y2K techno-collapse, things, as people, seldom change.

This is a fascinating text for a few reasons: given its proximity to World War II (22 Cells... was published in 1947) the portraits of some of the men are surprisingly humanising; the language used very much reflects the limitations of psycho-analysis in the 1940s; and the overall message is not one of heinous villainy, but of fear in how easily ‘normal', often unremarkable people, can be swayed towards something as violent and uncompromising as hard right fascism.

The book doesn't try to go too deep into the character of each of the 22 men on trial, but scratches enough through either direct conversation and analysis, supplementary materials provided by those close to the accused, or through historic anecdotes of childhood inferred from publicly available sources, to categorise the men as being either the tragic result of trauma, neurology, or just unscrupulous ‘bad eggs'. Kelley is careful however never to cast aspersions of evil - these were regular men driven, for their own reasons, to evil deeds. Nurture over nature.

The final chapter ‘What does it mean to America?' hits hardest as it rings terrifyingly true in 2026.

“Many people will say that this is a country of free press and of free speech. After all, the American racists are just talking or writing, and anyone in America has a right to talk or write as he pleases. This is quite true. But, at the start, Hitler and Streicher and Ley and Rosenberg were just talking also.”“The power of the spoken word has been emphasised over and over. [...] We allow ourselves to be overcome by emotional assault and battery and in turn use it to try to destroy the concepts and ideals of others.”“They use[d] racism as a method of obtaining personal power, political aggrandizement, or individual wealth. We are allowing racism to be used here for those ends. I am convinced that the continued use of these myths in this country will lead us to join the Nazi criminals in the sewer of civilization.”

Kelley goes on to suggest how the America of the late 40s ought to protect against the same bubbling threat that allowed Hitler and his cronies meteoric rise to power: democracy and education. How depressing that 80 years on, the political landscape is starting to look worryingly similar across the globe.