“I like to think,” says Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “that a lot of my work operates in a state between extreme hyperbole and understatement.” Another way of putting it: The tone of his fiction is mostly deadpan, while its content often screams with urgency.

Take “Zimmer Land,” one of the stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s 2018 debut, Friday Black. The story takes its title from a mythical theme park whose White patrons are encouraged to act out their fantasies of dealing harshly, even violently with Black people they find threatening just by being in the same space. The euphemism applied by the park’s managers to this dubious form of entertainment is “problem-solving.”

Such high-concept satire—droll, mordant, and unnervingly plausible—typifies most of the stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s critically acclaimed collection. And in his first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon, May 2), he has extended the theme of commodifying institutional racism into entertainment.

Chain-Gang All-Stars imagines an alternate present in which one-on-one death matches between convicted, condemned felons are broadcast live from standing-room-only arenas all over America thanks to something called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment as part of the growing privatization of the prison industry and the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for violent competitive spectacle.

The novel’s central character is Loretta Thurwar, CAPE’s brightest star by virtue of her winning record; having withstood three years of brutal, bloody triumphs, she is close to winning clemency, commutation, or a full pardon. The prospect deeply upsets her lover and sister gladiator Hamara Stacker, better known to her legion of fans as Hurricane Staxxx, who tends to weep copiously after each of her own victories. The novel takes in not just these two put-upon inmates, but their fellow all-stars; the guards and handlers who viciously keep them in line; and those who protest the games, the legislation that created them, and the whole penal system. Kirkus’ starred review calls Chain-Gang “an up-to-the-minute j’accusethat speaks to the eternal question of what it means to be free. Or human.”

In an interview conducted over Zoom from his home in the Bronx, New York, Adjei-Brenyah says he got the idea for the novel while gathering stories for Friday Black and that the concept was originally destined to be part of that collection.

“At first, it was going to be just about Thurwar,” he says. “And it was going to be her recollecting her time with this program and just when she was about to be free. And at some point, I said to myself, Wait a minute! I started thinking about the insidious nature of solitary confinement. Then I thought about the whole history of prisons and the Auburn system [a 19^th-century penal method in which prisoners worked in groups by day and were kept in solitary at night].

“That’s when I realized I needed to do more research about this,” he continues. “And the deeper I got into the subject, the whole philosophy behind prisons and punishment, the more I knew it was [too much] for a short story, where all you get is the tip of the iceberg and maybe, at best, a single perspective. With a novel, you deal with different angles, different points of view, fleshing out characters, and dealing with different settings as you’re also shaving off what you don’t need to make it more precise and direct, and just generally finding your way to the end.”

He sums up the novel-writing process as “a lot of years of swimming to shore with no shore in sight. It was scary.”

Born to Ghanaian immigrants 32 years ago in Queens, Adjei-Brenyah grew up in Rockland County, New York. From childhood, he was made aware of the racial and social inequities in the legal system from conversations with his father, a criminal justice attorney. He was also galvanized by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, the influential inquiry into the disproportionate incarceration of people of color. After graduating from SUNY Albany in 2013, he worked with the Rockland Coalition to End the New Jim Crow, an organization that, in its own words, works “towards ending the use of the criminal justice system as a tool of racial oppression.”

Adjei-Brenyah’s research comes through not only in his novel’s imaginative depiction of CAPE’s establishment and ruthless procedures, but also in footnotes that both augment the fictional narrative and offer historical facts related to the past and present of the American penal system. (“And I’m not exactly a footnotes person,” he said wryly.) One such footnote caps the true story of a 14-year-old African American boy who, in 1944, became the youngest person executed in the U.S.; we learn that 20 years later he was exonerated of the crime for which he was electrocuted—and that 186 wrongly convicted prisoners have been executed since 1973.

As he did more and more research, Adjei-Brenyah wanted to “engage” the underlying principle in our criminal justice system that “those who do harm deserve to be harmed,” he says. “I feel like that’s another way of saying at our core we are not a compassionate society, and I think that speaks to almost all my work. Until we address that reality, it’s really hard for us to progress to a more compassionate, more loving space.”

Gene Seymour, a writer in Philadelphia, has contributed to the Nation, the New Republic, and CNN.com.