While George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Margaret Atwood's dystopian visions possess oodles of (dark) soul and story, I'd argue the primary reason they linger in cultural memory are the places of true human fear they sting in our psyches. (Well, maybe not Putin's, or Trump's, or Kim Jong Un's, or...) And in the past two decades we have seen an explosion of dystopian fiction, each likewise trying to touch such places in our minds. Coming at readers with the latest hell-on-Earth is Joshua Krook with Black Friday 2050 (2022).
The year is—you guessed it—2050 and everyday man Jack Preston is going about his life. Married to a promising young woman and an up-and-comer at his corporate job, things seem to be going well in his tech-saturated life. But things get turned upside down when an accident relieves Jack of dopamine dumps. Forced into treatment by his corporation, Jack finds himself in a new mindspace, one that calls into question everything he knows about his everyday life, and the pleasures therein.
I'm struggling with responses to the book. Let's take a few around the block to see how they feel. Black Friday 2050 follows a tried-and-true story arc of taking a main character out of his perspective on life and giving him a new, darker, more realistic vision of it—a Keanu-Reeves-encountering-the-Matrix type of thing. Let's try again. Black Friday 2050 kicks the dystopian dead horse one more time in offering the story of Joe Anybody whose life is turned upside down by accident, joins an underground revolution, and emerges “victorious”. No. Again. Black Friday 2050, after approx. 150 pages, becomes an entirely predictable, templated tale that readers have encountered multiple times in one form or another over the years—and doesn't add anything interesting to it. No deep social commentary, no relatable characters, no clever scenes or moment, no well placed twist... The reader can read on auto-pilot, and will end up where they thought they would.
After the first few chapters of Black Friday 20250, my notes read: “Sheckley-esque, delicate tongue in cheek, realistic yet aware it is over the top, the true message an undercurrent waiting to be revealed...” I was wrong. Krook was serious. There were no tricks being played. What's presented is indeed a cheap thriller reminiscent of the silver screen—blasé for not having another layer of meaning. My later notes read: “too superficial to be taken seriously as dystopia; rather cheap-ish entertainment.”
Let's look at an example. Krook asks the reader to accept that Preston's firm is a major peddler of pleasure, but minimal evidence of said pleasure is provided in building the world. Pornography is not needed to accomplish this, but showing something of how deep the corporations have worked their way into society's pleasure centers is toward understanding precisely the forces at play, and the role Jack plays in it. Given the book's title, the obvious play is using the pleasures of consumerism. Alas, nothing is done with the biggest day of shopping, leaving the reader to wonder: why? (Uwe-Kling's Qualityland does a much better job of combining consumerism and dystopia.)
And there are other examples. The plot asks the reader to exercise suspension of disbelief more often than it should. Where did that character come from? How did the hero escape that? Wouldn't X have happened given there is Y? Such story questions are asked too often. The setting lacks a foundational realia. I get that there are books like Gibson's Neuromancer which plays games with its readers through settings, virtual and real. But the core of that novel is revealed the deeper the reader gets. Black Friday 2050 doesn't have a core. It perpetually floats on a mercurial surface. The reader can never fully imagine the setting their imagination is supposed to be living in. And the main character is as dry as a bone (pun intended). He lacks a soul the reader can sympathize with. This means readers never feel the primitive fear a dystopian setting should inspire. Sorry, but that's Dystopian Fiction 101.
In the end, Black Friday 2050 is a weak novel. Despite possessing the story beats such dystopian thrillers novels should, Krook fails to bring them to full, breathing life in a manner that grips the reader. The main character doesn't have enough personality to be relatable/worthwhile, and the things that happen to him range the spectrum of believable to absurd. The book feels like a B-list novelist's adaptation of a Hollywood film: serviceable by some means, but lacking the robustness of greater works. And damn, I don't normally pay attention to covers, but that one is... I don't even know what to say? Superhero at a club? Terminator headlights? Android neon?
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