Speculative fiction has long been a temperature check for hot button issues both in America and abroad. Sci-fi, fantasy, and dystopian novels grasp at the anxieties of the day with an urgency that can only come from their unique structure. In his debut novel, Chain Gang All Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah imagines a future in which Americans are tuning in weekly to a live reality television-esque sports competition in which incarcerated people complete in gladiator style death matches to eventually earn their freedom. The program is called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE), and it’s become a profit machine for the private prison system, supported by charismatic and compelling fighters who audiences root for or against. Each fighter is referred to as a “Link” of a “Chain”, which is basically a small group with whom they fight team battles and share resources.
Two of the CAPE program’s most compelling stars are Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker, called Hurricane Staxxx, who have won over fans with their fierce fighting style and prowess. The two women are also on the same Chain, and have managed to spark a romance amidst the constant violence. The novel certainly centers around these two women, but also jumps around in time frequently and features a polyphonic narration including many other “Links”, some rabid fans of “hard action sports”, some of the protestors who gather outside each CAPE fight, as well as more casual viewers who find themselves drawn into the disturbing but compelling violence. The novel takes great care to examine how each fighter came to participate in the CAPE program, the complex narrative threads that landed them in the hands of an exploitative industry, and the methods that they’ve relied on to survive that system.
Adjei-Brenyah forces the reader into an uncomfortable position with his writing—at once we are disgusted with the rampant violence, but we can’t help but be drawn in to the evocative nail-biting prose, which conjures the fights in magnificent detail. The novel features some fantastic sports writing and brilliant character work, aligning the reader with the fans who are so enthralled with their favorite hard action sports stars, asking us to confront our base desire to be entertained. Chain-Gang All-Stars manages to fit in an astounding amount of world-building and detail that makes its characters feel deeply lived-in and their environment frighteningly real.
The novel imagines a world in which the two machines of professional violent sports and the beast of reality television are fed into the grinder of the prison industrial complex, creating a Frankenstein’s monster of entertainment, violence, and structural racism. As a reader, I wish I could say that this work of speculative fiction felt very far removed from reality. It doesn’t—the novel merely imagines how the current threads of the carceral system and cottage industry of violence-based entertainment could entwine further down the road. The novel is deeply imaginative in terms of Adjei-Brenyah’s specific world and the characters who populate it, but he did not have to reach very far to to imagine a society that celebrates and commodifies violence against black and brown bodies. Like all good speculative fiction does, this novel raises a magnifying glass to the fascinating and terrifying nuances of modern day life, critiquing the system with a rare inventiveness.
This novel also has a deep well of compassion for its characters, who Adjei-Brenyah luckily refuses to flatten into heroes or villains. Most of the participants in the CAPE program are defined by the worst thing they ever did—rape, murder, or assault—but the novel carefully extricates these characters from any easy moralistic conclusions. They are all human beings, some of whom did terrible things to people they loved, but each of whom were failed in so many ways, and then ultimately commodified to serve the greater mission of profit for the lucky few. This novel was propulsive and truly thoughtful, one of the more incisive takedowns of the penal system in this country that’s been put to paper. Adjei-Brenyah has conjured a terrifying but magnetic world that will engross readers through its breathless final pages.