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 …
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)
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.
Sci-fi romance from an organizer for Prison Abolition
5 stars
Content warning
Describes vaguely how the book ends
The author used to organize for prison abolition and his sci-fi novel is based on a future world where people in U.S. prisons are asked to choose to participate in a death match that is streamed live all over U.S. It was hard to read at the beginning because of all of the gory descriptions but once I got through that it was a very entertaining but tragic tale of how violent our current systems are and how much worse it can get.
Even though I know about how prison officers wield power in prison, every time I read about what they do, it feels new every time to read how stark the contrast in power is. This book is as good as they are saying it to be. I hope it gets made into a big Hollywood movie. There is so much here that was gripping from the beginning to the end.
I kept wishing for the book to end more positively than it did. Maybe that is sadly as far as we can get to.
I wanted to give this 5 stars, but I’ve got a little too many nitpicks for it. I think this is a great read, very compelling, very well written on a sentence and chapter level. I love literary writing plus SFF when it’s done right, and this was done (mostly) right.
For me the author’s short story past was a plus. I felt like each chapter was well structured in a way you often don’t see in novels, and I attribute that at least partially to his experience with short stories. I didn’t mind the scale of POVs for the most part. The one-off chapters from Lasser and Mickey Wright were great.
The arc of Thurwar and Staxxx is the best part. Their love story (to be clear they are partners at the start, but we root for them), their conclusion, what they go through together. I predicted some of …
I wanted to give this 5 stars, but I’ve got a little too many nitpicks for it. I think this is a great read, very compelling, very well written on a sentence and chapter level. I love literary writing plus SFF when it’s done right, and this was done (mostly) right.
For me the author’s short story past was a plus. I felt like each chapter was well structured in a way you often don’t see in novels, and I attribute that at least partially to his experience with short stories. I didn’t mind the scale of POVs for the most part. The one-off chapters from Lasser and Mickey Wright were great.
The arc of Thurwar and Staxxx is the best part. Their love story (to be clear they are partners at the start, but we root for them), their conclusion, what they go through together. I predicted some of what happened, but I wasn’t sure until the very end what would happen in the last battle.
I appreciated how the author is trying to push us - is this kind of treatment ever okay? Even when the offender is a murderer or a rapist? And the author says no, torture is never okay. If anything I wanted more reflection on this.
My quibbles: 1) I found the protester POV chapters too insubstantial to be worth including. They provide the outside perspective sometimes, but I don’t think we need it. Or we needed a lot more of it. They aren’t given enough space to really add complexity. A little blip of a comment on abolition is too much and too little. 2) I found the notes within the book sometimes annoying - I had to remind myself that not everyone knows this information. But I never enjoy it when a story shows its hand too much, makes the message so explicit, feels preachy. The story itself had its moments, too, but overall characters don’t monologue or become the voice of the author. It was a weird experience to have both real statistics about incarceration and fictional backstory in the notes. I enjoyed the fictional ones. 3) Related to the previous point, some characterization was weak. As mentioned, the protesters felt too minimal. But Gunny also comes to mind. I expected his one POV chapter to give me something more interesting than it did. 4) The ending felt a little abrupt. I wanted to sit with it longer, process with the characters.
I saw some reviews saying how the book does a disservice to the fight against current prison practices by creating this fictionally worse situation to focus on. But I think the author’s point is that 1) in many ways it’s not fictionally worse - emphasized with the notes - and 2) we are perhaps not far from accepting such a system. This is also the point of a lot of SF - create a fictional situation that parallels or intensifies a real world one in order to highlight the injustice.
