Back in the 1980s, it was all “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” These days, not so much, with dystopian stories like The Hunger Games doing a much better job to capture the zeitgeist. Speaking of capturing, that’s one enterprise in which the United States still excels; about one out of every five incarcerated people worldwide occupy a jail cell here in America.
In his first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah mashes up “Orange Is the New Black,” The Running Man, Gladiator and mixed martial arts into a brutal prognostication of what could be next year’s worst “reality” show. It works like this: Prisoners whose sentences exceed 25 years are offered shots at freedom in exchange for three-year tours of duty as televised, weapon-wielding warriors. Much like in professional wrestling, there are storylines and factions and fan favorites, but “smackdown” in this ring means that only one “athlete” gets to leave alive.
Competing for-profit prison corporations provide teams called “chains” whose “links” vie against one another, either singly or in doubles matches. To ramp up the drama, individual links in a chain may occasionally turn on one another—many of them are murderers, after all—so the likelihood of living through the three-year tour is vanishingly small.
The story centers on a pair of warriors, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, who are members of the same chain, occasional doubles partners and lovers. While they are both successful at their current day job—being killing machines—Adjei-Brenyah has imbued them with a notable degree of tenderness. They’re aware that most of the links are going to be “freed” via slaughter in the ring, and their immediate survival requires them to focus their violence on their opponents rather than toward each other. A chain, after all, is only as strong as its weakest link.
The subtext here punches through like Anderson “The Spider” Silva delivering a knockout blow: The incarceration-industrial complex, hyped up on the steroid of private capital, encourages systematic racism and a rejection of any possibility of rehabilitation. So in Adjei-Brenyah’s brave new world, he recalls yet another notion perfectly articulated during the ’80s: “The Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.”