It’s chilling, and engrossing, and frustrating. Other stories, such as ‘Zimmer Land’, are mixtures of ‘Black Mirror’ and your worst nightmare, about a black protagonist who works for a digital theme park that allows its patrons to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner in the suburbs. Adjei-Brenyah forces you to look at it, and your relationship to it. This story, this book, speaks to the black experience in a way that makes you listen and understand things that seemed to be on the periphery. I had never heard the term ‘code-switching’ before, and if I had, I hadn’t really put a lot of thought into it as a white man. He can set it down comfortably at 4.0 with the aid of a necktie and wing-tipped shoes while being interviewed by a prospective employer, and up to 10 it skyrockets when his sense of vengeance bursts forth over the killing of five black children by a chainsaw-wielding white man. In his story ‘The Finkelstein 5’, Adjei-Brenyah’s main character speaks to his life in a world where he can dial his ‘blackness’ up and down, depending on the situation and who he is surrounded by. When I say 'chainsaw,' you have to pay attention.”Īnd pay attention is what he forces you to do. When talking to The Wall Street Journal, he said, “I like to work in that space where, 'Is it hyperbole? I don't know.' When you kill someone with a gun or a chainsaw, they're just as dead either way. When he had set out writing the stories that became Friday Black, he wished to use the medium of magical realism as a way to engage and deconstruct issues such as race, the ‘depravities of consumer culture and our collective habituation to violence’. Books that expand what we know to be true by using themes and plots that make our imaginations stretch. By the time Friday Black is finished, you either want to start a riot, or feel like you have been burned to the ground yourself.

Inciting is the exact word I want to use. He takes us on journeys that leave you breathless and angry, with violent episodes that are never tasteless, but constantly inciting. It’s a fresh observation on our world - his stories breathe life into genre fiction, so much life that it elevates the entire term of ‘genre fiction’.

Even though it was released in 2018, it might as well have been released in 2021. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah uses his words like a surgeon with a knife - it punctures with its precise strokes, and sometimes, tears you to pieces.

Nana kwame adjei brenyah friday black