Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes …
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, Thurwar considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games. But CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.
Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors, to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times)
384 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 2023 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
A harsh - but deserved - look at today's American prison system, through the lens of a near-future "light" sci-fi setting
Adjei-Brenyah did an excellent job of bringing the characters to life and turning them into people fighting a rigged system that doesn't view them that way
Ultraviolent prison abolition set in an immediate future where our societal capacity to inflict pain is only limited by death. Our characters are flawed violent criminals given by the author a full capacity for love and loss and trauma without any easy redemption.
Personal aside, it's six years since Begley's "Concussion Protocol" short video ended my watching American Football. The only parts of this book that are a little faint or maybe subtle are the few views outside of the penal world, and implicate so much more of our lives, in how our jobs and our passions and corporate interests deaden us to pain of others.
