In “The Moaning Bench,” one of many highlights in James McBride’s new story collection, a Muhammad Ali-inspired boxer who died after getting knocked down during a championship bout struts his stuff for hell’s Gatekeeper. “I’m so fast, it’s wrong,” declares Rachman Babatunde, hoping to avoid eternal flames through the force of his braggadocio alone.

Amused by Rachman’s brassiness, the irascible Gatekeeper, bored to death by all the begging, pleading dead souls, grants the heavyweight’s wish to resume the championship bout — which Rachman claims he would have won had he not been unfairly summoned from below.

The catch is that it’s not Blue Higgins he faces, but the Gatekeeper in the guise of that hard-hitting foe. And the fate of several other people at hell’s door, including a 12-year-old girl who died after disobeying her mother’s instructions to never cross the highway, will depend on Rachman’s ability to knock him out.

“He loves the evil in all people,” a ringsider says, when asked what Rachman whispered in his ear following the fight. “Because in loving their evil, he loves the evil in himself enough to surrender to God, who washes it clean. He’s loving what God made, is what he said.”

As a social commentator, McBride would no sooner indulge in didacticism than the rap-loving Gatekeeper would indulge in Dixieland. The author of the National Book Award-winning novel “The Good Lord Bird” possesses a biting wit, but disarms it with his calm, plain-spoken style.

“Five-Carat Soul” is set in both past and present. In “The Fishman Angel,” Abraham Lincoln, mourning the death of his 11-year-old son Willie, witnesses the verbal abuse of a black stableman by a black coachman who boasts he is “practically a white man” because he works for the president.

That scene and the intimate conversation between the stableman and his young son, we are led to believe, fuels Lincoln’s decision to declare war against slavery.

In four connected stories grouped under the subtitle, “The Five Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band,” a group of funk-loving teens, including the 14-year-old narrator, jam together to overcome the violence and prejudice they experience in a neglected neighborhood in Uniontown, Pa. The Bottom is a place where “understanding doesn’t come easy. It comes hard. And it don’t never feel good neither.” But the generosity of caring souls makes itself felt.

In “The Under Graham Railroad Box Car Set,” a black preacher and his family refuse to accept payment for a rare train set in their possession when they give it to a toy dealer — even though the antique is worth more than $1 million. (That the set was commissioned by Robert E. Lee for his 5-year-old son, who died before he could play with it, and later stolen by a runaway slave, adds complexity to their gesture.)

“Five Carat Soul” concludes with an allegorical five-part tale, “Mr. P and the Wind,” set in a zoo. There, an unhappy lion contends with Smelly Ones (humans), captivity and a weird pecking order by which “You got pigeons here telling monkeys what to do. You got giraffes making deals with tigers. You got eels, fish, turkeys, ducks ... each one willing to turn in their neighbor for a crumb of bread.”

A consummate entertainer, McBride has the comic energy and antic spirit of Richard Pryor (it’s impossible not to hear that late and lamented genius as the lion).

Though sporting a burst of violence, this quasi-novella ultimately is about inner peace and the belief required to transcend the physical world.

For all his good graces, McBride takes pleasure in skewering people driven by self-interest and indifference. There’s a lying lawyer who mistreats his guides and a fellow climber during his trek on Mount Everest. And there’s a TV news reporter who helps sensationalize a Chinese grocery store shooting: “If she was two-faced, I think she could’ve used the other one.”

If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the union, I don’t know what does.

Lloyd Sachs is a freelance writer.