"Zimmer Land," the sharpest of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's satirical science fiction stories in the collection Friday Black, imagines a Westworld-style fantasy theme park in which patrons, inevitably white patrons, get to defend their home against an actor playing a home invader. The narrator is an actor who is "killed" several times a day, and often by repeat customers, people whose murderous fantasies are so intense they come back again and again. The park--notice the allusion to Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman-bills itself as "justice-themed entertainment," where patrons can sharpen their moral decision making, but in practice, it serves as an outlet for racism and bloodlust. The story works because it correctly diagnoses the deep and harmful fantasy that drives American machismo and American gun culture, the belief that a "good guy with a gun" can be a superhero, and how this fantasy results in very real death for real black people.
It shares an outlook with another story, "The Finkelstein 5," in which black Americans are provoked to a campaign of national violence against whites because of the acquittal of a man who murdered five black children with a chainsaw, claiming he felt afraid for his children. It's the slight exaggeration, the outlandish detail of the chainsaw, that moves the story from bleak realism to speculative fiction, but it's perfectly calibrated: it feels absurd, and yet not outside the realm of possibility. Both stories feel like a particularly sharp-toothed version of George Saunders, who indeed provides praise for the dust jacket.
Another story I liked, and which is probably the strongest in the collection, is "The Hospital Where": On one level, it's a story of a man trying to navigate a hospital on behalf of his aging father. The narrator is a writer of short stories, and he tries to work on his writing in the waiting room, but he has writer's block, and the Twelve-Tongued God, the demanding deity of creativity to whom he has become an acolyte. Adjei-Brenyah links the creative impulse to the need to imagine a life outside poverty and marginalization; the Twelve-Tongued God winks and a hot plate becomes a stove. As the story progresses, we come to understand that the story we are reading is the one the narrator is writing, and over which he has incomplete control. A doctor tending to a family points at the narrator and says, "That young man there can end your suffering. He is putting you through this. Maybe for no reason at all." How can a writer balance the impulse to write the world into a better place with the need to take a sober look at real suffering? That's the tension that drives the story, and it provides a kind of exegesis of the way that Adjei-Brenyah uses science fiction tropes throughout the collection.
Unfortunately, I thought most of the stories didn't quite function. Some, like "Through the Flash," about a nuclear blast that causes the whole world to reset every day, are chock full of interesting ideas that really need the space of a novel to develop, making them seem overstuffed. The title story of the collection, about a retail worker at the mall on Black Friday, goes for anti-consumerist satire: the shoppers become primitive and violent, trampling even their family for the best deals, talking in caveman pidgin. It's an idea that would have been stale thirty years ago, and in 2019, it feels utterly anachronistic. Consumerism is alive and well, but it doesn't look like hordes storming the mall anymore, it looks like an Amazon serf being denied access to the bathroom. Grimly, this story is replicated twice more, in the stories "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing" and "In Retail," each time less memorably and inventively than the last. Swinging for the fences doesn't always work in these stories, but I prefer puzzling clunkers like "Light Splitter"--a story in which an Elliott Rodger-style shooter meets his victim in the afterlife--to the boring realism of those retail stories.
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