Bookstore Creep: Chain-Gang All-Stars from Parallel Worlds Bookshop

This column may be perplexing without context. Check out the previous columns in the Bookstore Creep series:

I - Love After the End, from Belmont Books

II - Hikuri, from Mother Foucault

III - Alien Daughters Step into the Sun, from Word Virus Books

IV - Free Association

Let me put this clearly, in case there has been any confusion as to my identity or my purpose on Earth. I, Rosalie L.H. Caggiano, am the product of my women ancestor’s creative and analytical repression. Wild angsty women being asked to fit into traditional roles for so long that the cork popped off the bottle. I am something that has been in a constant process of birth for the last hundred years, but I only gained enough substance to appear in the flesh recently. I appear human, and in many ways I am. I am a white, thirty-ish, very short woman. My eyes are large and my hair is a bit puffy. Unlike most humans, I was put on earth for two purposes: making games out of stories and mapping histories in literature. This column is one of my favorite games. It is like playing ball. I walk into a bookshop, and ask the book-tender my central research question: “What modern-day writers do you know of that are writing about or are participants in the counterculture, the underground, the transgressive, in the general vicinity of North America?” Catch. The book-tender takes a moment, maybe some minutes, and then hands me a book. Catch. My turn. What makes it fun and terrifying is this unknown, that I am opening my creative mind to respond to any book that is handed to me during this game. 

Up until this point, every single one of these columns has begun with an origin story, the moment where the book-tender selects a book and hands it to me. But you have already heard the origin story for this book in my last column. Sam from Parallel Worlds Bookshop handed me Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah months and months ago. I read the first thirty pages this September, struggling due to gore torture and other heavy themery. I asked a few people why they like horror, and contemplated their responses. Finally, as my deadline passed and passed again, I mustered the courage to read this book binge-style in two days.

The story is about two black women who are extremely in love with each other, with no hope of privacy or peace due to the fact that they are a part of “CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.” Their names are Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxx. This is a book about prison abolition and love. This is a dystopian, speculative fiction novel.

My central research question is to uncover the transgressive, the underground, the counter-cultural writers of modern day North America. There is no denying that rap, hip-hop, and spoken verse are the art forms of choice for some of the most thriving underground scenes there are, and are driven by black American culture. There is no denying that the rappers that make it big off of the stories of their suffering and the suffering of their families are experiencing the same phenomenon as those on The Chain in this novel. The story of a difficult life is edgy, and gives more well-off consumers a taste of adrenaline and ‘real life’. The thrilling story of their systemic oppression is making these superstars wealthy as that same system simultaneously inflicts pain, and boosts an entertainment industry controlled by the uber rich. The same dynamic is blown up to the level that it cannot be ignored in Chain-Gang All-Stars.

This book is a dystopian novel, but the farther I dove into the story, the clearer it was that nearly everything occurring in this dystopia is already occurring on this planet, in this country that I inhabit. Therefore, Chain-Gang All-Stars exists as a hybrid work, part fiction part non-fiction. By page 140, the footnotes cease to mix explanations of futuristic technology and corporations with real-world facts about prisons, and instead exclusively share real facts about the prison industrial system. The leaders of The Chains are mostly women, and the book also gets real about women’s experiences both in prison and as superstars. When Thurwar, one of the most lethal fighters and most respected humans in pop culture, goes to read her fan mail, half of the letters have a dick-pic attached. The book speaks through the first-person perspective of many men while they watch Thurwar, on TV or in the arena, and there is always a mention of their boner. 

After reading Chain-Gang All-Stars, I felt the need to listen to the author speak. As I watched videos of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, it became clear that the author doesn’t like horror any more than I do. This struck a chord in me. Sometimes the muse takes us to uncomfortable places in order to say the things that need to be said. While this book is about the entertainment industry, it is so disturbing that it is hard to be entertained. There are moments of excitement, immediately shadowed by higher levels of pain and entrapment. The book makes you feel the pull, the draw that the spectators of the gladiatorial games feel, and then pushes you away into your critical mind in the same breath. It became clear by listening to Adjei-Brenyah speak that the book is built on these uncomfortable contradictions. It is also why he chose black women as his two protagonists, because he had noticed the way that star athletes like Serena Williams could be both deeply respected and completely objectified in the same moment. He had noticed that black women inhabit a unique intersectional space in the public psyche that no one else can truly experience. 

There is no main antagonist in the book. The perspective shifts many times, practically with each chapter, but no one is an incarnation of evil, although everyone has a darkness within them. The true antagonist of the book seems to be the entertainment industry, profit motives, and technology. The ‘Influencer’ exists as the closest thing to a physical antagonist; a piece of technology that can be stabbed into the body and adjusted with a remote controller. The Influencer is the closest thing to pure pain embodied on this dystopian earth, and was created with good intentions, by someone who wanted to end pain forever after watching her father suffer from intense nervous system dysfunction. 

This is the kind of book where everything probably has layers upon layers of meaning. So I had to wonder, why does this book mirror so many others; with these Gladiatorial arenas and fights? Has it not been done a million times? This is a Penguin Random House published, New-York-Times-Bestseller type of transgressive fiction. Interesting, that it blows up so big while being so damning of this country. It’s a bit of a joke, the way that it is selling well; reinforcing its own point; that black people’s suffering really does sell. 

Rene Chun, a journalist for The New York Times, described transgressive fiction:

“A literary genre that graphically explores such topics as incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, the sprouting of sexual organs in various places on the human body, urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience and that the body is the site for gaining knowledge.”

Maybe taking a classic tale like gladiatorial games and adding layers of transgressive discomfort is a wise and radical move. Maybe it is changing the collective memory, associating Adjei-Brenyah’s critiques with a cliche that will come up time and time again in conversation and free association. The success of this book also showcases the fact that revisionist work has to appear to be fictional in order to be allowed as safe. It is almost a trick, a heist, to wrap up real messaging in catchy fiction. 

Beyond putting a darker and more fact-based spin on a classic tale, Adjei-Brenyah also frames fights so that they are eerily similar to the infamous Rikers Island fight nights. After more research, I found that in 2022 some videos from Rikers Island leaked out, causing a moment of outrage over inhumane conditions in the prison where inmates were forced to fight each other for entertainment. Maybe the conditions of these modern-day prisons will also come to mind more now, when people think of gladiator games. 

Let’s return to the main characters. Hurricane Staxx and Loretta Thurwar live as a part of a ‘chain’, or a group of people put together on a team and set to march around and fight together for the sake of reality TV. Their chain’s name is Angola-Hammond. Angola is another name for the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the name of the slave plantation that used to exist in the same territory, is the largest maximum security prison in the United States, and it is a prison farm.

I want to leave you with an impression of Staxx.

Staxx is portrayed as a goddess and she acts in a crazed, seductive, funny, powerful, artistic rage. It is worth mentioning that she was put in jail for killing a teacher who had tried to rape her while she was in High School. In a footnote she is likened to Cyntoia Brown, a real person who was initially given a life sentence at age sixteen for killing a man while defending herself. She seems to be the most godlike of all the characters, except maybe Hendrix “Scorpion Singer” Young, who is a one-armed man also channeling an ancient god. His ancient god may be one brought to the plantations during US slavery, as he sings old spirituals and working songs like “Long John”. 

The following is maybe a poem, or maybe a speech that Staxx gives towards the end of the book. It is left on its own, without explanation, so I will leave it alone once more:

“STAXX

Call me criminal. Cold heart catastrophe

Call me uncalled, call me king

Call me crazy, even as you kill me, you call me killer

Call me, hear my name, call me now

STAXX

Call me culled, call me kite

Call me candlelight kept

Call me Kane, call me Christ

Call me church of the Creator

Call me what you call me

STAXX

Call it as it is

The life you give is death

The death I give is life. Is love at least

So call me Colossal

Call me corrupt, call me clean

Call me cure, call me Hurricane

STAXX

Hurricane

STAXX

Hurricane

STAXX

Come call, come call, come call me complete.”

Rosalie L.H. Caggiano

Bookstore Creep contains recommendations from the continuous investigation of Rosalie L.H. Caggiano into modern-day authors who are writing about the counterculture and the underground in the USO (The United States Of...). The USO is a zone that may encompass the whole of what is known as North America, or might not quite make it to the Southernmost and Northernmost hinterlands of what is known as Mexico or Canada. Rosalie searches for modern writers that upend the impression that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore”. She talks straight to the book-tenders of the City of Portland, exploring bookshop by bookshop instead of wallowing in the depths of the 129+ million books on Earth without guidance. She is beginning the construction of an extensive stainless-steel 3D diagram that documents the intricate webs of writer’s connections and histories, which become more and more clear with each column. This diagram already takes up most of her backyard.