Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS

Was Monday Night Rehabilitation your favorite scene of Idiocracy but you wish it was not only serious but a searing indictment of the United States' incarceration- and punishment-focused criminal justice system? Are you looking for some brutal speculative fiction that will also educate you fairly thoroughly (for a novel) about the history of human rights abuses in the prison system, but with a heaping helping of material that illustrates how high technology could make it all magnitudes of order worse? Do you like footnotes* in your novels?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has you covered, friends. 

These are not complaints about his book, by the way. Quite the opposite!

Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of those books that you go into expecting to be emotionally and spiritually slapped around and punched in the gut for your own good, and you will be, but it's far from being the mere hybrid of Oz and The Hunger Games that its marketers would have you expect. For one thing, it's primarily a love story, if a most unconventional one. And no, I'm not calling it "unconventional" because the protagonist and her lover are both women. Or both incarcerated. That's actually pretty conventional for stuff that I read. And anyway, I don't mean that kind of love story; this isn't a romance novel. A love story. 

First, though, a basic outline of the book's premise, which alone is enough to induce nightmares. In a dystopia near you, technological advances in prisoner control have reached nightmarish levels, to the point where new inmates are subjected to the implantation of devices that allow their jailers to literally drag their bodies along with magnets, or hold them motionless, or, most horribly, induce levels of direct neurological pain beyond anything previously known to science without doing any actual physical damage. Just a load of psychological damage to personality-warping, or even erasing, levels.

This alone would make for a harrowing story, but Adjei-Brenyah has more horrors for us. For not only are prisons now fully privatized, and seem to have completely absorbed entire sectors of the U.S. economy like manufacturing, food processing, anything that requires, you know, labor -- but the mega-corporations who own them have decided that their neo-slaves should also become the entertainment industry. Select inmates are pulled out of their ordinary prison-hells and turned into modern-day gladiators, forced into nomadic lives marching in small teams called Chains from city to city all over the country, and when they reach the next city on their eternal itinerary, fighting to the death in sports arenas before enormous live crowds and worldwide television (holographic?) audiences.

Oh, and pretty much all their time trudging between cities and camping overnight is a reality show that's every bit as popular as the games. No holds barred. No privacy at all. So, e.g., if our heroine, Loretta "Blood Mama" Thuwar and her lady-love Hamara "Hurricane" Stack choose to enjoy intimacy in their tent at the end of the day, four or five little autonomous drone cameras will be in there with them, getting all the angles for the titillation of millions.

Why would anyone agree to such an existence? Well, first of all, did you pay attention to the horrible coercion technology I described above? And second, it's kind of a way out of the prison system; if you're killed in battle or en route (or in camp by a member of your own Chain), you are regarded as Low Freed. If you survive a set number of battles, you can be High Freed - as in released back into the general population, on your own recognizance. Back in the real world.

We don't just follow Thuwar and Stack on their bloody perambulations, though. Interspersed chapters introduce us to some ordinary prisoners and let us share their brutal daily lives by way of tracing a person's journey from, say,  neo-slave meatpacker to becoming one of the guys destined to face Thuwar's nasty, heavy war hammer or Stack's vicious scythe.

And we also meet a few people on the outside, including the host of the premium sports feed of the actual battles (only the reality show of between-battle life is free; tickets to the fights are hideously expensive, and the telecasts aren't too cheap either) and his wife who is slowly being seduced into becoming a fan of the show, and a handful of activists who still think all of this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and are trying to do something about it.

Most poignant of these is Patricia, a woman who dedicated her career to ending the kind of pain that tormented her father as he slowly died from bone cancer in her youth, but whose work (you can just feel it coming already, can't you?) wound up actually yielding the pain-inducing technology the prison system has come to rely on. Her story alone would make a compelling novel, but is much more devastating woven in here with those of the victims she never intended and the people working for a little bit of clemency for them. 

But remember how I called this a love story? It truly, truly is. Thuwar and Stack are lovers, sure, but not in the, say,  Mickey and Mallory Knox sense that a scenario like this might lead us to expect. They are convicted murderers, both of them, and have each killed many more people since their original crimes, but they are both still committed to maintaining their humanity and dignity -- and to helping the rest of their Chain to do the same. While most Chains are free-for-all blood-baths of treachery and literal back-stabbing, Thurwar and Stack have managed to make theirs more like a family, though it's one of which they, and particularly Thuwar, who is pretty much the G.O.A.T., are in charge, and since it's composed of murderers and rapists turned bloodsport athletes, it's an all but farcically dysfunctional one. 

And the pair have at least partly made names for themselves for extending love not only to their fellow gladiators, but to their opponents (Hamara telling each that she loves them, and holding them tenderly as they die) and even the spectators getting their jollies by ogling them, catcalling them, betting on them and watching them murder other human beings. You know, the thing they got sentenced to prison for. 

Love, too, pervades the stories of the abolitionists trying to end this system, some of whom, we find, have every reason not to want these inmates back in society. Adjei-Brenyah has a fine sense of drama.

He also, and this may make this book more attractive to some readers than it did to me, very good at writing fight scenes and other violence. You players of, like, Mortal Kombat and whatnot will be very satisfied on that score. No character wholly escapes the brutality, and we're not spared it either. It's not stomach-churningly gory, but it's very, very violent. And very, very sports.

I like neither of these things, nor do I like reality TV. But I like books that confront the kind of issues that Chain-Gang All-Stars does, especially when they do it as well as Chain-Gang All-Stars does.

But yes, I skimmed the action scenes. 

*Adjei-Brenyah employs footnotes throughout the book for two distinct and interesting purposes; one, to convey factual information about our own actual world of 2024 in the U.S.A. in all its merciless ugliness, and two, to offer a running meta-commentary on the characters the narrative introduces to us, makes us care about, then kills off spectacularly. The combination forms a unique rhetorical device that I hope does not become a tiresome trend but wouldn't mind seeing a little bit more of. Speaking of which, I really hope there's a sequel to this because I really want to watch what happens to [REDACTED] next!

Tim Powers' MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Anglican Church," he muttered. "You nearly never go to church anyway -- your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is -- I don't know what. The wind.

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than ten minutes knows how much I freaking love Tim Powers. He was the first author I ever put on the Automatic Buy list, long before I realized I even had such a thing.

But because he was the first and was, for a long time, the only, I still collect him in hardcover. Which is a format which I read with increasing difficulty as the years go by.

So while I was running around screaming like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Powers' latest, My Brother's Keeper, to come out, had pre-ordered it the moment that was possible, I'm only now, almost a year later, finished reading it.

I beg you, do not take that as any kind of commentary on its quality, anymore than you should take its dirt-common title or its cover blurb from, of all people, Orson Scott Card.*

Because My Brother's Keeper is Tim Powers' tensest and creepiest read since he invented his own micro-genre of literary historical weird fiction (which lesser mortals have failed to duplicate. Cough. Seth Grahame-Smith. Cough) with The Stress of Her Regard, to which he returns here, not with a sequel like the serviceable but not exceptional Hide Me Among the Graves, but a true spiritual successor, pitting the Brönte sisters, their hapless brother and their Yorkshire parson father against a family of sort-of werewolves. I say "sort of" because these are werewolves in the way that the lamiae of Stress/Hide Me are vampires. This is still Tim Powers, an OG chaos magician of literature, the kind of guy who says "what if these classic monsters but both cooler and more sorrowful?"

And yes, of course there is a very Heathcliff-esque character striding the moors with Emily Brönte and her gigantic bull mastiff, Keeper (who is one of the best dog characters I've encountered in recent years and within recent years I read Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. Keeper ranks up there with Wood!), but he is not an inspiration for Heathcliff; the Emily of My Brother's Keeper already has a completed manuscript of Wuthering Heights in her writing case, has indeed been tempted by her brother, Branwell, to meet the wonderfully sinister and perfectly named villain, Mrs. Flensing, by suggestions that Mrs. Flensing has publishing connections in London. 

No, Powers just lets Alcuin Curzon, the "one-eyed Catholic" whom Emily and Keeper rescue one day, serve as a sort of unremarked-upon slant-rhyme to Heathcliff, the better to enlarge the imaginative power of she whom Emily Dickinson named "Gigantic Emily Brönte" by his presence, instead of diminishing her by creating a lame figure for her creation to be based on.

I like it.

Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a Tim Powers novel since the very first time I read Last Call. Do not snooze on this one, or I'll let Mrs. Flensing get you.

*Just, remember that we liked Card once, and he wrote some good books before he started milking his IP dry.