The Monday After Black Friday – "Friday Black" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It's an OT

Today is "Cyber Monday" I suppose. One of the most hateful two-word combos in the English language (according to me). "Cyber" needs to go back to the eighties, stay locked up there until armageddon. And Mondays... well. You know where Monday can go.

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Instead of looking for deals on shipping container-sized flatscreens, let's reread the opening of the title story in Adjei-brenyah's debut collection: Just kidding. Tell us about your hauls or whatever you wish.

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    "Get to your sections!" Angela screams.
    Ravenous humans howl. Our gate whines and rattles as they shake and pull, their grubby fingers like worms through the grating. I sit atop a tiny cabin roof made of hard plastic. My legs hang near the windows, and fleeces hang inside of it. I hold my reach, an eight-foot-long metal pole with a small plastic mouth at the end for grabbing hangers off the highest racks. I also use my reach to smack down Friday heads. It's my forth Black Friday. On my first, a man from Connecticut bit a hole into my tricep. His slobber hot. I left the sales floor for ten minutes so they could patch me up. Now I have a jagged smile on my left arm. A sickle, half circle, my lucky Friday scar. I hear Richard's shoes flopping toward me.
    "You ready, big guy?" he asks. I open one eye and look at him. I've never not been ready, so I don't say anything and close my eyes again. "I get it; I get it. Eye of the tiger! I like it," Richard says. I nod slowly. He's nervous. He's a district manager and this is the Prominent Mall. We're the biggest store in his territory. We're supposed to do a million over the next thirty days. Most of it's on me.¹ 

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Coats. He's responsible for snagging the coats for customer/zombies. "PoleFace™" and "SleekPack" brands. The narrator has been the sales leader for several years, and the leader gets the to choose an item to take home. He has a SleekPack coat for his mom set aside. Predictably, it's a bloodbath. He's bitten by one his first Black Friday and can now understand the grunts and monosyllables the shoppers emit, thus providing an edge to his ability to get them what they want. They kill anyone who frustrates them from their goal.

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The story is nothing new; anyone who's worked retail during the holidays has had the same thought. Romero made explicit in Dawn of the Dead² what was sort of implied in Night of the Living Dead³ – the  zombie is a metaphor for consumers confusing the difference between want and need. Id Monsters. And like an excited toddler pointing at the ocean and saying, "Wawa," The Walking Dead, in both the comic and show, screamed it in your face with Rick's "WE are the walking dead" line. 

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In any case, Adjei-Brenyah is reiterating Romero's plan of using zombie shoppers to show the monstrous appetite of the modern consumer. They're pure id, I think Romero said. No self-control and a complete erasure of the difference between want and need.

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A scene at the end has him eating at the foodcourt amid the chaos – it's all bodies and hollow eyes and abandoned shopping carts – the narrator meets a shopper he helped with her coat. She's still experiencing full Black Friday and snarls and snaps at him until he calms her by reminding her he got her her SleekPack coat. She grunts "weak." He understands this to mean her daughter and husband were killed shopping because they weren't strong enough. He gives her his second burger before heading to work.

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Capitalism has subverted our survival instinct and used it to manufacture desire.

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The author tells you in the ending that compassion is also a survival instinct, although severely weakened by the modern corporations' greed and need to satisfy their investors. He goes back to work but gives up his winning coat to one of the shoppers trying to kill a coworker.⁴

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(Makes you wonder what else you might have missed, doesn't it?)

I read the collection in 2018 but I've thought about it every Black Friday since. The book is blurbed by Mary Karr, Roxane Gay ("Read this book" she blurbed), George Saunders; the last of whom he credits for showing him a different way of writing fiction. I've put off reading his debut novel, The Chain-Gang All-Stars, but it's been on my list.

There's a typo on page 112 where a shopper "points" a face in blood. Obviously it should be "paints". Just something I noticed since that's what I am; a faultfinder. Ugh. Spell check is not the same thing as editing, people.

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¹ Friday Black © 2018 by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. There are some fantastic stories in the collection and a couple of clunkers. A few that are almost exactly like George Saunders's stories. It's all right. Adjei-Brenyah was only in his late twenties when this published. He has leagues to grow.

² 1968. Birth of the modern idea of the zombie, about which I believe Romero said they were Id Monsters.

³ 1978. Romero often made himself sound like some sort of idiot savant, claiming he doesn't even think about the social commentary aspect. It's so obviously there though, and I think he was just being humble. Of interest to Romero fans, his wife and partner had been trying to get his last Dead script into production. Twilight of the Dead now has director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Stonehearst Asylum) and actor Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil: Too Much Zombie Wow!, Dazed and Confused, Leeloo & Stitch) attached to it. I'll see it eventually, but no, I am not excited.

⁴ Last word about compassion and then I'll leave you alone forever. Adjei-Brenyah shares similarities with Saunders and Vonnegut. The kindness which he shows to the shoppers and coworker in the end reminded me of the scene in The Dawn of the Dead in which one of the characters helps out a zombie nun whose robes are caught in a door. She opens it slightly so the nun could wander off for eternity. I found that act oddly touching and funny.