 Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
The author is best known for his novel Chain Gang All-Stars, a biting dystopian satire where prisoners fight gladiator battles to the death for the entertainment of reality TV viewers. Several of the stories in this collection take a similar approach: take an existing atrocity and crank it up to 11. The best story, "The Finkelstein 5," was inspired (if that's the right word) by all the cases where a White person gets away with killing an unarmed Black person simply by claiming, "I felt threatened." Incredibly, Adjei-Brenyah takes this situation and makes it worse - which leaves the Black main character to decide what he's going to do about it. Similarly, "Zimmer Land" is set in a macabre theme park where the narrator plays the "suspicious-looking Black man" that customers can pretend to kill. Three of the stories are narrated by staff at a coat store in a suburban mall. "In Retail" and "How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing" are real-world stories about the pressure to sell, sell, sell. "Friday Black" imagines a grotesque Black Friday where customer deaths (by trampling and fights) are so common that there's a dedicated employee assigned to dispose of the bodies. The final story, "Through the Flash," is about people reliving the same horrifically violent day over and over. Should it worry me that I read it on Groundhog Day? Trigger warnings for violence, mutilation, cruelty, bigotry and pet death. Popsugar Reading Challenge: Under 260 pages. 52 Book Club Challenge: Day of the Week in the title. This Challenge Killed the Bookworm: Retail therapy.
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