Could Adjei-Brenyah push a story past its weird 'what if' premise to sustain such a singular blend of wit and fury in a longer format? ... Chain-Gang All-Stars answers that question with a searing affirmation. It’s a devastating indictment of our penal system and our attendant enthusiasm for violence ... Adjei-Brenyah’s book presents a dystopian vision so upsetting and illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing ... Adjei-Brenyah pushes the blade of his satire hard against the capitalist system that’s transformed 19th-century slavery into a modern-day profit center.

This is one queasy testament to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s talent: You cannot applaud his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, without getting blood on your hands. To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them ... This is also why his book works. It is an act of protest, but it does not straightforwardly preach ... This book is not shy with its allegories ... Adjei-Brenyah...bends the lurid into the lyrical — pretty words about hideous deeds. Some of his best fight sentences sound as if Joe Rogan had fallen into a trance and assumed the diction and rhythms of Toni Morrison. If you recoil at that unholy fusion, that’s kind of the point; and the author keeps pulling off this shock, page after page. Adjei-Brenyah has a fine intuition, an almost spatial sense for what we need to see and what we don’t ... The novel is a thorough display of authorial control; Adjei-Brenyah only ever loses his handle on the pace and tone in a few meandering dialogues ... A writer who was up to the ideological but not the emotional task of such a novel might have settled for thinner characters. But Adjei-Brenyah, flitting from perspective to perspective in brisk chapters, assumes all of them easily and fills the characters’ inner lives to the brim, especially those of the incarcerated.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah sets his ferocious debut novel in one of the most inherently dystopian institutions ever conceived — the American penal system. With ruthless dexterity, he erases that comforting border between who we are and, if unchecked, what we might become. And the future is now ... Because Adjei-Brenyah skews so close to the atrocities we know, the implausible melts into the unnerving, yet possible ... With Chain Gang All-Stars he lets us think we’re reading a satire, but soon reveals a mirror of our dystopian days that lie not too far away.

It is a testament to Adjei-Brenyah’s idiosyncratic talents as a satirist that this premise, which initially seems outlandish, feels disquietingly plausible by the novel’s end ... Adjei-Brenyah introduces a wide cast of incarcerated fighters, each of whom—like professional wrestlers—has a signature style, moniker, catchphrase, and weapon. Although many characters appear only briefly—usually because they’re killed shortly after being introduced—they tend to be memorable, and in their descriptions and voices, Adjei-Brenyah shows off his polyvocal skill.

While [George] Saunders’s empathetic send-ups leave us feeling better about the lovable scrum of humanity, Adjei-Brenyah (who studied with him) offers a transformative, clear-eyed critique. Chain-Gang All-Stars is a feat of world-building and Juvenalian satire that is also an indictment: a TV-ready adventure story about reality television, America’s unquenchable thirst for violence, and the retributive means of torture and racial-class control cruelly euphemized as 'the justice system' ... Adjei-Brenyah has much to say about lawbreaking, punishment, the psychology of inflicting pain, and the dirty bargains people make with themselves to survive an antagonistic system. You might fear that the characters would be paper cutouts in a morality play designed to make readers feel good about their politics. But Adjei-Brenyah is far subtler than that ... Reading this kinetic, ambitious novel, I kept seeing news stories that could have been a Chain-Gang All-Stars footnote, and that’s undoubtedly Adjei-Brenyah’s point ... It’s a bold artistic choice to keep pulling the reader out of the story via metacommentary—and it works...Chain-Gang All-Stars is deeply moral and informed but not preachy. Its correspondences with the US system always serve the story and relentlessly heighten its stakes. He distills and dramatizes the genius of the abolition community and its decades of work into a new kind of allegorical fiction—one with a whole movement behind it.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah established himself as a formidable writer of literary speculative fiction, building fantastic premises out of hard looks at American reality cranked a degree more demented. With his first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Adjei-Brenyah has burnished this approach into a complex, brutal, beautiful, panoramic takedown of the prison-industrial complex ... It reads like Adjei-Brenyah drew inspiration from an array of contemporary calamities — including reality TV competitions, NFL brutality, the private prison boom, Americans' obsession with violence and true crime entertainment, and the incessant video loop of law enforcement's extra-judicial execution of citizens — and blended it into a potent fictional world ... Chain-Gang All-Stars is at once original, its own fresh creation, and clearly part of a lineage of American literature ... Adjei-Brenyah's distinguished novel updates this tradition to encompass our dizzying, barbaric, performative and capitalistic digital age.

Adjei-Brenyah’s prose creates a whiplash effect that unsettles us while enticing us forward ... Adjei-Brenyah’s writing transports us to a crossroads of love and pain, life and death, oppressor and oppressed, real and speculative, to consider difficult questions ... Visceral .... In its refusal to provide an easy blueprint for eradicating egregious regimes like the prison industrial complex, makes the simple (but not easy) request that we linger with the ugly contradictions undercutting American society and the human condition.

The novel follows an obvious lineage of grisly pop epiphenomena from Squid Game to The Hunger Games to Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale, but philosophically its antecedent may be the famous battle royal chapter in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as it operates from the clear design of illuminating the racism and barbarity of the American carceral system. This creates a catch-22: Since the novel assails the exploitation of black prisoners for entertainment, it cannot be freely entertaining itself, and a dampening sense of shame and reluctance permeates the scenes, which are often interrupted by footnotes dispensing sobering statistics about the prison system—not the one in the novel but the real one ... It will be easy for this novel’s readers to distance themselves from the racist bloodlust that underwrites its dystopia, which makes the book what I have come to categorize as an 'NPR satire' (Gary Shteyngart is the king of these), in which proper-thinking liberal audiences are left basically unscathed by the critique. A straightforwardly realistic novel about prisons would be infinitely more damning—though, paradoxically, it would never be selected for book clubs.

The novel is a crushingly painful, loaded and on-the-nose commentary on racism, exploitation, inequality and the legacy and loud echoes of slavery in the US ... Unfortunately, the richness of the conceit makes it tiresome to read ... Even though the ideas are big and bold, the novel is a slog. In its characters’ endless cycle of violence, misery, trauma and rumination, all light and shade is lost. There is action in spades, but little real plot; dialogue, but little psychological nuance. We are told many of the condemned characters’ tragic backstories, often in poignantly throwaway footnotes....we do not feel them or feel for them. The main characters glower like video game characters and talk like CGI bounty hunters. Adjei-Brenyah is clearly a writer of substance, with something to say. As we anticipate later novels by him, maybe skip this one and wait instead for pop culture to eat itself, shed all irony and churn out the inevitable Netflix adaptation.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive, almost too much to process ... it’s a nightmarish burlesque about industrialized racism. The sheer weight of this supporting evidence—happily accommodated by the book’s maximalist style—frequently spins us off course. Alternating chapters roam far and wide, keeping tabs on a supporting cast of TV executives, 'abolitionist' protesters and a sceptical armchair critic who is slowly sucked in and converted. These cutaways give Chain-Gang All-Stars the bracing panoramic sweep of an old-school social novel in the vein of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, but the technique needs finessing. As it is, Adjei-Brenyah combines the winning confidence of a young artist who is unafraid to tackle an enormous canvas with the nervousness of a debutant who worries about leaving his reader with the same group of people for more than a few pages at a time. His plot is constantly interrupting itself to move us along and show us something new.

It’s difficult to escape a feeling of complicity as you read. Adjei-Brenyah raises a mirror to our own performative influencer culture, mass-media entertainment, and, above all, the American carceral system. Chain-Gang All-Stars is an abolitionist polemic, a tirade against the modern prison-industrial complex ... By footnoting his pages with a mixture of real and invented facts about US prisons, he creates a kind of palimpsest, overwriting an otherwise fantastical sci-fi narrative with bracketed realism ... Given the novel’s vast cast, encompassing prisoners, activists and a spiteful gameshow host, Adjei-Brenyah’s individual characterisation can be patchy; even Thurwar and Staxxx, while fleshier than most, have frustratingly loose back-stories. But Adjei-Brenyah’s sentences are nimble, his chapters brisk yet full of brio. He knows what he’s doing, and it’s this innate authority that makes Chain-Gang All-Stars so compelling – right up to the final, fatal blow.

An acerbic, poignant, and, at times, alarmingly pertinent dystopian novel ... Adjei-Brenyah displays his impressive range of tone and voice as he deftly manipulates several points of view through shifting time periods; all the while, he maintains control over the elements of his dreaded alternate America, using footnotes and asides to elaborate on the laws and customs of this world but also making direct and similarly detailed connections to the real-life, present-day state of the nation’s mass incarceration system with its brutalities and injustices. It is an up-to-the-minute j’accuse that speaks to the eternal question of what it truly means to be free. And human.

Breathtaking and pulse-pounding ... Through this brutal, fight-scene-studded story, the author delivers insightful critiques of the prison-industrial complex, capitalism, and the ways in which Hollywood and celebrity culture exploit Black talent. Both the political allegory and the edge-of-your-seat action work beautifully. Readers will be wowed.