‘Friday Black’ Uses Fantasy and Blistering Satire to Skewer Racism and Consumer Culture

In “Friday Black,” the title story in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s strange, dark and sometimes unnervingly funny debut collection, a shopping mall turns into a site of carnage as rabid shoppers stampede through the aisles of a clothing store in pursuit of discounted winter wear. The narrator, an unflappable salesman, calmly tosses fleece jackets into the frenzied crowd as trampled, mangled bodies accumulate.

The story is a not-so-subtle critique of consumerism run amok. But like all effective satire, there’s a glint of truth and accumulation of mundane details that make the farcical scenario feel plausible.

Like his narrator, Adjei-Brenyah had to contend with ravenous shoppers during the holiday season, back when he worked in a clothing store at the Palisades mall in West Nyack, New York.

“I’ve seen somebody step on someone else to get the jeans on a Black Friday,” he said, still sounding confounded by the behavior he witnessed. “How did you decide to step on a human being to get a pair of jeans?”

Similarly simple but profound questions animate the other stories in “Friday Black,” which uses fantasy and scorching satire to tackle issues like school shootings, abortion, racism, the callowness of commercialism, and how cyclical violence can be passed on across generations.

Most of the stories take place in prosaic settings — shopping malls, theme parks, hospitals, suburban neighborhoods, college campus libraries — but Adjei-Brenyah renders prosaic scenarios unfamiliar by adding a surreal, disorienting twist.

“Sometimes hyperbole comes from saying the truth plainly,” Adjei-Brenyah said. “It helps me get directly to the point.”

In “The Finkelstein 5,” the first story in the collection, Adjei-Brenyah takes this approach to its extreme conclusion. To write about the experience of code-switching as a young black man, he gives the protagonist, Emmanuel, the ability to dial his “Blackness” up or down in different situations. He adjusts his Blackness to 1.5 for a phone call with a prospective employer, and raises it to a 10 when he joins a radical protest movement. He’s come to expect routine racism — like a security guard demanding to see a receipt after he buys clothing in a store. But he’s moved to action by a grotesque act of brutality, after a man who decapitated five black children with a chain saw gets acquitted by a jury.

By making the murders so vicious and extreme, Adjei-Brenyah manages both to deliver a shock, and to point out our diminished capacity to experience shock at the routine violence against unarmed African-Americans.

“If I see someone who looks like me getting murdered with impunity, that feels like something I should talk about,” he said. “Just how bad does it have to be for us to care?”

During a recent interview, a few weeks before the book’s release, Adjei-Brenyah, 27, gushed about his favorite writers — “Toni Morrison is God,” he said, seemingly without intending hyperbole — and was stunned by the growing tsunami of praise “Friday Black” has generated. The collection has been compared to works by literary titans like Isaac Babel, Ralph Ellison, Anton Chekhov and Kurt Vonnegut, and has drawn ecstatic blurbs from Mary Karr, Dana Spiotta, Charles Yu and Roxane Gay, who called it “dark and captivating and essential.”

Adjei-Brenyah grew up in Spring Valley, New York, the son of Ghanaian immigrants. As a boy, he devoured science fiction and fantasy and Japanese Manga. Later, as an undergraduate at the University at Albany, SUNY, he made his first attempt at writing for a wider audience. After learning of yet another police shooting of a young African-American, he stayed up all night writing a pamphlet denouncing systemic racism, which he printed and scattered around the campus.

“I went to bed at 5 a.m. that morning thinking, well, I fixed racism,” he said. “I basically just littered all over the campus.”

The pamphlet got little attention. But Adjei-Brenyah became determined to find a vehicle for his ideas, a medium that would both entertain readers and deliver a blunt message. “Part of me was like, how do you make people read it?” he said.

He took a writing workshop with novelist Lynne Tillman, who urged him to read works by George Saunders, James Baldwin and Grace Paley, among others.

“In this very ferocious period we’re living in, in a period of great binaries, he’s able to find another way to talk about these issues we’re facing,” Tillman said.

Some of his early stories were about working in retail, something he knew a fair bit about from the years he spent working at a clothing store in the Palisades mall and later at the Crossgates Mall outside Albany. In some ways, being a salesman was good preparation for being a writer. He became a keen observer of people’s moods and mannerisms. He learned how to intuit both what they wanted and what they could afford, and how to read into the details of how people dressed and where their eyes lingered.

“I can upsell, I can downsell,” he said. “A lot of it is noticing what people are noticing.” One Black Friday weekend, he sold about $17,000 worth of North Face jackets, he said. As a reward, he got a free North Face jacket for his mother, a detail he slipped into the story “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing,” which is narrated by an adept salesman who gets a free PoleFace jacket for his mom after selling almost $18,000 worth of merchandise.

There were grim moments at the mall that shaped his fiction too. About a decade ago, when Adjei-Brenyah was working at the mall, someone fell from one of the mall’s upper floors and died, in a likely suicide — an event that he alludes to in his short story, “In Retail.” The hum of shoppers shopping halted briefly, but resumed after the body was taken away.

When he got to the graduate writing program at Syracuse University, where he now teaches, Adjei-Brenyah first tried writing realistic stories — “because I wanted to be taken seriously” — but fantasy started seeping into his work. He read Ishmael Reed’s experimental satire “Mumbo Jumbo,” and something clicked. “I didn’t realize you could be so irreverent in talking about these issues,” he said. He saw he could use magical realism, or something like it, to write about the issues that had always preoccupied him — race and the depravities of consumer culture and our collective habituation to violence.

He enrolled in a writing workshop with Saunders, a contemporary master of fiction that teeters on the edge of otherworldliness, who became a mentor to him. One of the first stories he submitted to Saunders was a draft of “The Finkelstein 5.”

“It was just a mindblower,” Saunders said. “As fantastical as the story is, it’s referring to reality. Racism is real, and that’s what it feels like from the inside.” Another story he showed Saunders, “Zimmer Land,” unfolds in a theme park where patrons pay to act out their racist revenge fantasies on actors impersonating “thugs” and terrorists. Before he finished it, Adjei-Brenyah asked Saunders if he minded him using a theme park setting, since Saunders is famous for, among other things, writing fiction set in creepy theme parks. Saunders gave his hearty approval.

“This is a person who’s using fiction to ask and answer big, urgent questions,” Saunders said. “That’s why the stories feel new, because they’re compressed tools for moral exploration.”

The 12 stories in “Friday Black” veer between pure realism and straight-up science fiction, and something in between. The juxtaposition feels casual rather than deliberate, perhaps because Adjei-Brenyah finds distinctions between literary and genre fiction, and between fantasy and reality, meaningless.

In one of the more personal stories in the collection, “The Hospital Where,” the narrator is tending to his sick father when he is confronted by a god with 12 tongues, a demonic muse of sorts who compels him to write stories.

That’s what it feels like to him when the urge to write strikes, like an almost supernatural possession, Adjei-Brenyah said.

In the story, the deity issues a command to the aspiring writer before she leaves.

“Don’t be boring,” the god admonishes him.