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In 2021, Chris Stuck published his debut book, a satire-rich story collection called Give My Love to the Savages, with “Big Five” publisher HarperCollins, specifically its imprint dedicated to publishing Black voices, Amistad.
The book was a success by every metric. One of its stories won a prestigious Pushcart Prize. It was a finalist for the PEN America Literary Award and the Oregon Book Award. “Stuck’s examination of Blackness panders to no one,” The New York Times wrote in a glowing review, complimenting the author’s madcap style and hilarious wit. This is a collection that opens with a story that shows a man during every moment in his life in which he’s been called the N-word and follows it with “How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century,” a story about a guy named Dick Dickerson who one morning wakes up to find himself transformed into a literal giant dick.
But while his book was hitting all the marks, Stuck experienced the disillusionment new authors often face. Overall support from the publisher around the book’s rollout was minimal—a harsh reality of the struggling book industry—and the whole experience of transforming an art work into something like a commercial product, once a dream, left a sour taste in his mouth.
So when it was time to publish his second collection, Stuck decided to do so independently, and he started his own small press called Black Heroics. He learned InDesign and IngramSparks, the print-on-demand distributor service for independent authors and presses. He even made the cover art—taking a photo of the Black power salute statuette he keeps on his bookshelf.
Inspired largely by the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and the time when “all that stuff, that racial stuff…was just everywhere,” as Stuck tells WW, the stories in Baby, This Is a High-Priced Country (Black Heroics, 210 pages, $17) deliver hard American truths through clever satire.
Written from a jarring second-person perspective, “You Can’t Spell Slaughter Without Laughter” follows Adam, a white man married to a biracial woman named Eve who was the victim of a drunken driving accident that left her brain damaged. When Adam is offered revenge on the Black man who committed the act, he’s forced to confront the ways in which racism lives in his body.
In the title story (it’s a James Baldwin quote), Gen-Xer Thurgood and Gen-Zer Jacob, two Black detectives who begrudgingly work at the Bureau of Racial Inquiries, are sent to investigate reports of a “Black cult” in White Township, Mississippi.
Opening the collection, a story titled “The Electronic Negro” zooms in on the more specific experience of being Black in a mostly white Portland:
The ad was stapled to a light pole I passed on my morning run. It said, “Are you Black?” I was. It said, “Are you the only Black person in your immediate area?” I looked around. Yep. I was. Then it said, “Do you yearn to meet other Black people in your same American predicament?” Of course. Why not? “Well, call the number below because we at The Black Friend Association can hook you up.”
After the narrator calls 1-800-BLK-LOVE, he’s paired with a new Black friend. At first, it’s a breath of fresh air. But only at first. As with most of Stuck’s stories, something is off-kilter. Turns out his “friend” may actually be a robot modeled after the narrator himself, delivering some bland version of the deeper connection the narrator seeks.
It would be impossible not to read the story as a comment on Stuck’s own experience in Portland. And he’s not shy about naming his frustrations. “When I did encounter Black stuff,” he says, “it just wasn’t my kind of Black thing, you know what I mean? It wasn’t, I hate to say it, but it wasn’t smart enough.”
At the same time, the Virginia native says he loves the city today. He grew up here. And since the book has come out? He’s met a lot of new friends and other independent publishers doing what he’s doing.
“I’ve always heard of music people selling stuff out of the trunk of their car, doing shows and selling their stuff themselves,” Stuck says. “So it was always there, but I never thought I would do something like that. Sometimes—I’m still trippin’—I can’t believe I actually just did this! It’s kind of weird.”
READ: Baby, This Is a High-Priced Country by Chris Stuck. Black Heroics, 210 pages, $17.
