"Corporate Gunslinger" by Doug Engstrom (2020)

 **A vision of near-future America that is chilling, but also so obvious that I'm almost wondering why we don't do this already**

I'm tagging this as "Dystopia", but frankly it's close enough to what we have now that it barely counts.  Or at the very least, brings up some pretty bleak questions about current American society.  Which is, obviously, the whole point that the author is trying to get at

Set in near-future America, the "specfic" idea is that the country has added a new feature to the insurance system:  After your claim is rejected, your final appeal has been denied, you have one last option:  A duel to the death versus a representative of the insurance company

And of course, these fights are broadcast on live television.  Because, duh, America.  The fights are shown in bars across the nation, people gamble on the outcomes (if this book had been written only one or two years later as sports gambling has truly taken over the industry, I guarantee the author would have included more), and the top gunslingers are celebrities with fans and followings and everything.  Thus enters our main character, Kira Clack, nicknamed "Death's Angel" by the gun sports media

This book is a tried-and-true narrative style, opening as she is gearing up for the biggest fight of her career ("'Chloe’s ex?' Kira laughed. 'And I was afraid they might pick somebody I didn’t want to shoot.'").  Rewind/flashback to her first day of training, and we get to see how she got here.  We see the student and medical debts she had, how becoming a gunfighter seemed like the only way out.  We see the person she had to become in order to do her job.  Early in the book, as she talks with her mentor:

“What’s it like to pull the trigger on another person?”

Diana drained her wineglass and turned. Light from the windows played across her face.  “Probably not as hard as it should be. A lot of the training is desensitization. Like when we tell you to imagine the targets and the mechs as real people. That’s so when you go up against real people, it feels like shooting at targets and mechs.” She shrugged. “It’s a cheap mental trick, but it works.”

This book is marketed as a satire and a dark comedy, and I think the latter label in particular fits.  The entire novel is played completely straight, no jokes, but the entire book is basically pointing at modern society going, "I mean, that's fucked up, right?".  Not just the main characters and their plot, but every side character, every detail of the world:

“I picked up Roger Davis during my first rotation as an instructor.” She took a drink. “He’s got severe ADHD. Parents didn’t know how to help him. His school couldn’t deal with him, so he dropped out. He got fired dozens of times, but he hit a TKC open tryout on a good day. Once he was on the Guild medical plan, I found a therapist who helped him work out the right mix of meds and coping strategies, and he made it through a year as a gunfighter. He moved into the Guild’s training evaluation section, and now he’s the Midwest Region’s coordinator.” Diana settled back against the rail. “As a society, we knew how to help him, but until he took this job, nobody did the work.”

I loved this book because it knows what it is and it knows what it isn't.  It's not a big adventure story, it's not about toppling the oppressive regime (not that I don't love those too!  I've reviewed more than one of those on this blog already, no spoilers).  It's a story about a society that has a whole lot of problems, and it's the story of one person who does what she has to do just to be able to live her life.  Spoiler, she has to choose between a lot of very bad options.  She doesn't always make the best choice.  But in the end, it's our society's fault for not giving her many good options.  That's the dark comedy of this novel--everyone, from Kira to her coworkers to the people she's facing in the ring, is at *best* trying to choose the least shitty of a range of very shitty choices.  No one really does anything good, because no one is really given an opportunity to

I'd honestly love to see this book as a stageplay, because there are barely any characters (three characters that get more than a few dozen lines), few sets.  The story, like Kira's life, is pretty simple

This book is pointing at modern society going, "I mean, that's fucked up, right?"  And when we counter, "it's not that different from what we do now," the book replies, ". . . exactly my point"

I loved this book