Something is surging in the cultural imagination, and it isn’t superheroes saving the world from alien invasions. Vigilante fiction, stories about individuals who dispense justice when the system refuses to, is climbing bestseller lists and streaming charts simultaneously. In June 2026, Larry Correia‘s American Paladin knocked romantasy titles off the top of Amazon’s urban fantasy charts immediately after a $300,000 Kickstarter campaign. The same week, low-budget film Citizen Vigilante starring Armie Hammer muscled into the top 10 on iTunes despite having no theatrical release and a production budget reported as low as $5 million, before grossing an estimated $65 million and counting.
These aren’t isolated data points. They’re a signal.
What does the vigilante surge look like in the market?
Jonathan: According to Apple TV chart trackers from FlixPatrol, Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante muscled into the top 10 movies on iTunes in the United States within days of its June 19, 2026 release. The low-budget film stars Armie Hammer as an American who turns vigilante against criminals in a broken justice system.
Thomas: When we say low budget, we’re talking as little as $5 million, essentially indie film territory. Reports have it already grossing something like $65 million, with no theatrical release, and it’s still surging. That’s a huge deal. It’s something everyone writing fiction needs to pay attention to.
Jonathan: According to the European Conservative, German film authorities de facto banned Citizen Vigilante by refusing to assign it any age rating at all, despite its violence level matching John Wick or The Equalizer, both freely available in Germany.
The story draws partial inspiration from real German cases that ended with suspended sentences for violent attackers. American audiences responded to the German censorship by pushing the film up the charts anyway. If you’ve ever been frustrated by a story about someone who murdered or assaulted another person and received a suspended sentence because they looked remorseful in court, this movie was made for you.
The same week, Larry Correia’s American Paladin seized the number one position in urban fantasy categories and made strong placements across hardcover, e-book, and hot new releases, and those numbers don’t even include the true fans who backed the Kickstarter, which raised $300,000. These are people who just bought the book on Amazon.
The novel follows Mike Spears, a drifter vigilante who hunts monstrous incursions from thin places in the modern American West. He operates with a gun and a code, answering to no official authority.
Thomas: I started listening to this book yesterday, and I’m already halfway through it. It’s so good. It’s more a vigilante story than an urban fantasy. The character is a regular vigilante hunting human monsters while also trying to find supernatural ones. He’s keeping his ax sharp by practicing on garden-variety human monsters.
It almost seemed like the same character from Citizen Vigilante, especially at the beginning. The stories diverge quickly because Correia’s is supernatural, but we’re seeing what looks like a new archetype. Except it isn’t. It’s a time-tested archetype that has appealed to American readers for hundreds of years, and it keeps reemerging.
How old is this archetype?
Jonathan: This concept is ancient and we see it in the Bible. When there was no justice, God said, “Here’s a judge. You’re going to get justice.”
Thomas: Samson operated outside the legal framework. He was fighting against the powers that be. And Shamgar had a sharp stick. That’s what he operated with.
Vigilante fiction in America goes back at least to 1782, when the legislature indemnified Colonel Charles Lynch, who conducted extrajudicial tribunals against loyalist plotters during the Revolutionary War. He punished loyalists to the British with whippings, fines, and property seizures, operating entirely outside the legal framework.
It goes back even further to tarring and feathering. If you’ve seen the HBO series John Adams, it portrays a tarring and feathering based on a real account in the Boston Gazette, January 25, 1774. A tax collector trying to enforce a tax the colonists refused to pay had his clothes torn off, was covered in boiling pitch, and then had feathers thrown on the tar while it was still hot. The boiling pitch created second and third-degree burns. Some people died of tarring and feathering.
This act of the people taking justice into their own hands was called Lynch’s Law. When a judge failed to give justice, the people appealed to Lynch’s Law, and there would be a lynching, up to and including hanging. Lynchings later took on a racial connotation, but they were originally used against whoever the mob felt had escaped justice. Colonel Lynch himself was hanging loyalists, Englishmen loyal to the British Crown. There was no racial element at the start.
Which fictional character is the ancestor of Batman, Zorro, and the Punisher?
Thomas: The origin of the masked vigilante in literature traces to a book by Robert Montgomery Bird called Nick of the Woods. Nick was a Quaker, a pacifist, and a man of peace. His family was killed by Native Americans and his government did nothing. He had no particular set of skills, being a Quaker, so he had to cultivate them. He became Nick of the Woods, dispensing justice himself because the courts failed him, going on a killing rampage to bring justice for his dead family.
There’s a lot of scholarship connecting Nick of the Woods to Zorro, to Batman, to every masked vigilante that dominated 20th-century comics. They can all trace their literary lineage back to this one book. Since it’s been in the public domain for generations, you can read it for free and write your own vigilante stories without worrying about anyone’s copyright.
Nick of the Woods is the Punisher. Nick of the Woods is Batman. Nick of the Woods is Zorro. Nick of the Woods is Citizen Vigilante and the character from American Paladin. It’s the same story, the same primal fear that someone is out there in the dark making the bad guys afraid.
Batman tracks the zeitgeist pretty closely. Sometimes it’s a goofy show; sometimes it’s dark and brooding. You’ll notice Batman has been killing more people in recent years, because the zeitgeist demands it. Readers are longing for brutal justice because they don’t feel justice is being provided in real life, and they’re seeking it in fiction.
What’s different about vigilante stories today?
Thomas: For many readers, the first time they heard the word “vigilante” was J. Jonah Jameson raging about Spider-Man. Spider-Man was called a vigilante because he was fighting forces the police couldn’t fight, including gods, aliens, and scientific marvels that a cop with a pistol is completely incapable of stopping. The police were good. Spider-Man was working with them as much as outside them. His message was, “I can fight this alien; you can’t. Let me do what you can’t do.”
That is not what we’re seeing in this new wave.
The issue isn’t “can’t.” It’s “won’t.” Both American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante share the same core premise. The police won’t investigate this, won’t prosecute it, or will let the convicted walk. The people these characters go after are often people who were convicted and then released, and the vigilante’s message is, “You shouldn’t have been let off for raping or murdering someone, so I’m going to give you justice instead.”
In Citizen Vigilante, the American character goes to a victim, a battered woman, and asks, “Do you feel like you got justice?” She says no, because the rapist was released. So, he goes and kills him. That’s why the film was banned in Germany. You can kill Russians in a fictional story and German film authorities are fine with it, but you can’t kill migrants from anywhere else.
Jonathan: The film Law Abiding Citizen hit about 10 to 15 years ago with a similar premise. Gerard Butler plays a man whose family is raped and murdered, one of the killers makes a deal and gets off, so he hunts them down. It turns out he’s a former CIA assassin, and he starts working his way through everyone associated with the travesty of justice his family suffered, whether cops, a judge, or anyone else connected to it. When you’re watching the movie, you’re never entirely sure if he’s right.
What’s the difference between a revenge story and a vigilante story?
Thomas: I think fatherhood is what makes the difference. A revenge story and a vigilante story both start as a pursuit of satisfaction. Both often begin with harm done to the protagonist’s family. But the father in a vigilante story extends his fatherly protectiveness outward. There’s another young girl who looks like his daughter who’s been abused by the bad guys, and so he goes and kills those bad guys too. It’s like saying, “I couldn’t give my daughter justice, so I’m going to give this young lady justice.” He’s taking on the role of the oldest government, the family government that predates the state, and saying, “The state has failed you, but for right now, you can be my daughter, and I will bring you what a father can give.”
That’s different from John Wick getting revenge for his dog. Nobody sees John Wick as a vigilante story, even though he follows a very similar code and doesn’t shoot up everyone at the nightclub, only the bad guys. It doesn’t feel like vigilante justice because he’s giving satisfaction for himself, not for victims.
Jonathan: Once John Wick gets the satisfaction of killing the one that killed his dog and took his car, it becomes a survival story. Nobody thinks of it as “just a dog” because they did a good job of storytelling. The dog was a surrogate for his wife. It was her last expression of love to him, and that’s what was casually destroyed. But it’s about vengeance, not justice.
Thomas: Here’s the clean distinction. In both American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante, the vigilante is acting almost as a neutral judge. He’s not the victim. He’s following a code, an objective and transcendent standard of justice. That’s what makes readers say, “Okay, we can accept what you’re doing.” It’s like Judge Dredd. He follows the law. That’s his code.
Jonathan: When they follow that objective standard, readers are willing to accept it, because they’re replacing the justice system that should have been doing the job in the first place. It’s different from a Western where the sheriff comes in and calms the mob so the judge can hold a proper trial and restore an institutionalized process.
Thomas: Another distinction is that revenge is personal. It’s “I want this person to suffer.” Vigilante justice is about institutions. The policemen in Citizen Vigilante didn’t victimize the woman, but they stood aside, so they still get killed. The judge didn’t convict the rapists, so he dies. That’s not revenge. It’s institutional accountability. It would be revenge if the victim herself were the one doing it, which is the kind of story we saw a lot in the ’70s. That’s not what we’re seeing now.
Jonathan: Vengeance and justice sit in a Venn diagram. God established cities of refuge in the law not because he said “don’t kill the guy who just killed your brother,” but to say, “Here’s a place you can run to so it can be handled in process.” Vengeance done correctly requires someone who can handle all the factors that go into it.
And cycles of vengeance are why we built Western civilization. Neutral third-party justice is a core element of it. If a jury of your peers convicts you and a judge presides over the hearing and you’re executed, the victim’s family has no claim of vengeance on the community. Nobody is solely responsible, so there’s no cycle.
What makes a vigilante character work on the page?
Thomas: The protagonists in both American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante are very careful to execute only the guilty. The Paladin has a code. If you’re going to write a vigilante story, that carefulness has to be part of it. Otherwise readers experience a visceral revulsion. It stops feeling like justice and starts feeling like a mob. If somebody strikes you and you kill them, that’s a life for an eye. That’s out of balance the other way. Life for a life has to be balanced.
What we’re seeing in these stories is the hard times making hard men. American Paladin‘s world is darker and scarier than any of Correia’s previous books, partly because it’s less magical. But there’s this beacon of light, the Paladin violently bringing justice through a dark world. You write a dark setting so the light can shine brighter.
Jonathan: Some people are built for violence. There are personalities more tuned to be destroyers. I have that personality. It doesn’t hurt me to hurt people. The only thing I feel is my hands aching or the recoil hitting my shoulder, because I find satisfaction in dispensing justice, whether it’s sanctioned by the government, in a self-defense context, or in teaching others to do the same.
If you don’t have that personality, I’m not sure you can write that character convincingly. You tend to stereotype and get a shallow interpretation. I’ve studied the way I have because I’ve seen how bad humans get. I know what humans are capable of, and I’m not letting them do it to my daughters. Even in the Marine Corps they noted I was willing to go further than anyone else.
I’ve met very few people who have this personality, and even fewer who do it right. There’s a meaningful difference between this and sociopathy. A militant atheist I served with in the Marines was getting on me about something in the Bible, and I asked him, “What do you think I would be without the Bible?” He stopped, thought about it, and said, “Okay, that’s a point in your favor.”
Thomas: I read The Sociopath Next Door, and it had me seeing a sociopath behind every tree. The very next book I read was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Reading Lewis right after that, I thought, “Oh, Edmund is clearly a sociopath. The way he torments his sister is very sociopathic.” It was important to be reminded that yes, sociopathy is real and common, but it can also be redeemed. Aslan saves Edmund. And in my experience, sociopaths who get saved have to let the Holy Spirit operate as their conscience, because they don’t really have their own. They have to walk by faith for basic social interactions in a way that people with a functioning conscience don’t.
There’s a binary between sheepdogs and wolves. But a sheepdog can turn and start eating the sheep, and all sheepdogs descended from wolves. White Fang is the story of a wolf that went further into darkness than anything else and was then redeemed by love.
Is there an angle here for writers who don’t want to write a vigilante story?
Thomas: For women in the audience who don’t want to write a straight vigilante story but want to work with this zeitgeist moment, write a Beauty and the Beast story where the beast is a vigilante. It’s an ancient story found across all civilizations, about women softening the edges off of men. You see it in the Bible. You can argue Ruth and Boaz is a Beauty and the Beast story. It’s a tale as old as time.
The nature of the beast can change. The Disney version gives us a monstrous-looking creature, but the deep civilizational version is simpler. It is the woman handing the man a bar of soap. “If you want to be married to me, you’re going to use this. I appreciate the protein from the hunt, but wash yourself before you come in the tent.” You have to expand it and make it cinematic, but it resonates because there were beastly elements in my own life as a bachelor that have been, shall we say, improved now that I’m married.
Jonathan: There’s a cinematic from League of Legends on YouTube called “Still Here” that captures this beautifully. It follows Tryndamere, a warrior hunted by Death itself, smashing arrows out of the air and fighting off the spirit Kindred with everything he has. Then two arrows fly past Kindred’s head and hit the enemies coming up behind him. It’s his wife, Ashe, running out of the forest. As she reaches him, the demon light fades from his eyes, and in her face you read forgiveness. She says, “You had to, to live.” I use that video a lot when talking with people about PTSD, about men desperately fighting off death, saved by someone who simply loves them.
Thomas: There’s something very alluring to women in having conquered a man who is dangerous to everyone else but has a soft spot for her. That’s part of what makes Beauty and the Beast work so well. Even Pride and Prejudice has that flavor to it. The interplay between justice and mercy opens up a lot of interesting fiction, and it’s an angle worth exploring.
How do Christian writers justify a vigilante protagonist?
Jonathan: This isn’t just an American secular concept. God is very clear in Scripture. He says, “Take care of the widows, the orphans, the defenseless, and the innocent, or something will come for you.” Romans does say you should obey the government. But the institution God put in place before the king was a theocracy where every man was responsible for his home and his ancestral lands.
Justice brought by fathers, enacted by fathers and sometimes groups of men. It’s an extremely old scriptural concept. In Judges, when a travesty happened in the tribe of Benjamin and they covered for it, the other tribes got together and addressed it. Justice is the most important thing. When it’s enacted where it’s supposed to be, everything is all right.
We see a turn in Westerns where mob justice is portrayed as wrong, and there’s a point where it is wrong. It can’t be feelings-focused or impulse-driven, which is largely how mobs operate. But sometimes the mob is right.
Thomas: The standard of justice is written on our hearts. You see it throughout history, in the Old Testament, in Hammurabi’s Code, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. That’s the default standard. The modern view that “an eye for an eye leaves the world blind and toothless” is basically arguing against justice altogether, and that’s very scary.
There does need to be room for mercy. What you want is a government that wields the sword and provides justice so the mob doesn’t have to, and so fathers don’t need to feel the need to do it themselves. We have a check on that in the jury system.
There was a case in Texas where a father came upon a man abusing his 12-year-old daughter. He started beating the man and didn’t stop when the man ceased to be a threat, which is where self-defense law says you have to stop. This father continued and killed the man with his bare hands. They brought him in for manslaughter and put it before a Texas jury. The jury looked at what the abuser was doing, looked at the father, and said, “I don’t see a crime here.” The prosecutor left very sad that day. That’s that life-for-a-life standard.
Jonathan: The story of David is important here. When his city was burned, his wives taken captive, and all his men’s families taken captive, David went to the Lord and asked, “Do I go up?” And the Lord said, “Go up.” You’ll see that pattern throughout David’s vigilante period. He didn’t just assume. He got direct authority from the source, and then he went. If you just claim you got it direct from the source and do whatever you want, then yes, you’re a murderer. But if someone is after your family and you ask the Lord whether this is a circumstance to turn the other cheek or to imitate your shepherd and take care of those under your care, and the Lord says “Go up,” then go.
Thomas: One thing American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante share is that the vigilante accepts the full moral weight of what he’s doing. American Paladin returns to the same line several times. The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good men to be afraid of doing hard time. The Paladin fully accepts that he who lives by the sword dies by the sword. I’d be shocked if Correia ends the series with the Paladin retiring peacefully somewhere. Part of walking this path is accepting its destination. The hard men that make good times are not the men who enjoy the good times. They die in the making of them.
Jonathan: Jesus came down and told the keepers of the law that they were doing it wrong. He healed on the Sabbath. He went into the temple and drove out the merchants with violence because they were misusing the law and the temple. Any time the supposed keepers of the law had anything to say about it, he called them mean and nasty names.
Thomas: The whip in the temple is totally his vigilante era. And notice how they responded. They asked him, “By whose authority do you do this?” That’s exactly the question you ask a vigilante. “Who gave you the authority?” And Jesus didn’t tell them. He gave them a riddle instead.
Jonathan: When they brought him the adulterous woman and tried to trap him, saying, “By your law that you say you wrote, she’s supposed to be killed, so do we kill her?” He knelt and wrote in the dirt. Think about where he was. He was in the temple. There should not be dirt you can draw in with your finger in the command hallway of the holiest building in the world. The fact that Jesus could kneel down and doodle in dirt tells you how far the maintenance of the temple had fallen. And it says the oldest down to the youngest were stricken in their hearts. When he stood back up and they were all gone, he asked her, “Where are those that accuse you?” She said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I don’t accuse you either. Get out of here and don’t sin anymore.” Grace and justice at the same time.
Where’s the opportunity for independent authors right now?
Thomas: You’re not going to get your vigilante story published with a traditional publisher. A major Hollywood studio isn’t going to pick it up. But what you will get is resonance with readers.
Arc Press isn’t a big publisher, and they’ve blundered this launch. They have the e-book priced at $14.99 and it’s not in Kindle Unlimited, despite the fact that Correia already reached the premium market with his Kickstarter. The fact that he’s anywhere near this bestseller list at $14.99 is mind-boggling. I haven’t been impressed with Arc Press’s marketing, positioning, or pricing, though I think they’ve done well on the editing side, because the book is fantastic.
The opportunity for outsiders is that you can just write the kind of book readers are desperate for. There’s a real hunger for this fiction right now.
Vigilante fiction lends itself very well to episodic storytelling. Zorro was episodic as a pulp. Batman has been episodic for 80 years. The Punisher, episodic. The structure is simple. Open with the bad thing the bad guy did, show the justice system failing the victim, introduce your vigilante who gives justice anyway. Rinse and repeat. That story will sell.
Dylan Hunter is doing exactly this with a vigilante-style episodic story at patreon.com/dylanhunterteam.
Jonathan: The most popular versions of these are the ones with fathers as the vigilante. Taken wasn’t a new story, but it hit the market so hard because everyone said, “Yeah, I like this.” When the Mandalorian lost Baby Yoda in season two, he went and got him back, and everyone was with him every step. When that scout trooper punches Baby Yoda and you just hear that little squeak, and my kids visibly startled on the couch. They couldn’t believe someone punched Baby Yoda. It just created this “yes, go get ’em” energy.
Should vigilante stories end in tragedy?
Thomas: It’s okay to write morally bad characters doing bad things if you do it in a moral way, which means showing them suffering the consequences of their decisions. When the American Paladin series is over, the Paladin has to die. He has to die by the sword. He has to drink the full measure of the cup he’s poured for himself. And in that way, his death is its own justice. He chose to walk this path; this path has a particular destination.
We’ve lost the ability in Christian fiction to write a tragedy. Christians don’t write tragic tales, but there are tragic tales in the Bible, and there is particular moral power to a tragic story. The best Marvel film, in my opinion, is Infinity War. Its ending is a tragedy. Your favorite characters turn to dust. American audiences in many cases had never experienced a real tragedy. People left the theater quiet and shocked. That is a powerful emotional experience. Powerful emotional experiences are what cause readers to love books.
Jonathan: I would say a wholly tragic story won’t do very well right now. People need hope. But you can make tragedy a part of your story. Susan’s arc in Narnia ends in tragedy. The Last Battle is a tragedy, and that’s why it’s people’s least favorite.
Thomas: The way Marvel got away with Infinity War is that they technically made Thanos the protagonist. He won. And Endgame was coming to undo it. Where American Paladin needs to end with the Paladin dying and the princess living. The knight fighting to protect the princess, St. George, needs to die ultimately, but the princess needs to be saved. Not true tragedy where everyone is destroyed. Tragic elements as a tool in the toolbox.
This is where Christian fiction is really weak. It’s trying to be Hallmark, and Hallmark has a very broken moral system. The villains aren’t really villainous, the evil isn’t really evil, and the redemption isn’t very redeeming. Nobody goes through a real moral arc. Nobody changes. The Narnia books, by contrast, have characters who are morally flawed. The children sin and do terrible things and experience consequences. Aslan tears Aravis’ back open with his claws in The Horse and His Boy. It’s shocking to a modern audience. People keep trying to recreate Lewis, but none of them are willing to go there. If you can’t go there, you can’t be Lewis.
What happens if writers get this genre wrong?
Thomas: Writing is complicated. If you get it wrong, you can distort the worldviews and morality of your readers. There is a very real possibility that the rise of vigilante fiction will lead to a rise in actual vigilantism, not the discriminating kind but the revenge-killing kind, factional violence, cycles of vengeance. These stories are resonating with millions of angry young men, and that’s a civilizational question that China, America, and Europe are all having to face right now.
If you’re not going to write the virtuous vigilante story, the one with a redeeming element and a core truth, other people will scratch that itch. And they may do it with a less moral code, in a very polluted way.
As an author, you can step in and use tragic elements as a warning and say, “I’m going to show where this path leads. I’m going to have a protagonist who’s doing bad things for good reasons, a core moral system that’s good, and I’m going to explore that in a true and good and beautiful way.” There’s a lot of power there.
One difference between American Paladin and Citizen Vigilante is that there’s an extended brothel scene in Citizen Vigilante that’s quite explicit. The citizen vigilante is not nearly as wholesome a character as the American Paladin. We have a choice about what kind of stories to create. There’s room for an even more righteous version, a paladin who’s genuinely divinely directed, not just operating on a secular appeal to higher justice. That story hasn’t been written yet. Some of you should write it, and write it quickly.
Jonathan: The point of all this is nuance. Understand what people want and also what they need. You can incorporate tragedy without losing hope. Just find what people need and give it to them without fear. If something stops you, ask yourself whether it’s genuine conviction or whether it’s anxiety about what might happen. Somebody might need that story.
Sources:
- Jared Taylor on X, June 18, 2026
- European Conservative: Banned Before Release – Germany Rejects Migrant Crime Movie
- Massachusetts Historical Society: John Malcom Tarred and Feathered in Boston (includes Boston Gazette and Country Journal, February 14, 1774 account)
- Historical Marker Database: Origin of Lynch Law (includes 1782 Virginia General Assembly indemnification)
- Apple TV: Citizen Vigilante
- Amazon: American Paladin by Larry Correia
- FlixPatrol: TOP 10 on Apple TV Store in the United States, June 2026
- Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837)
