Jesse Ball – The Repeat Room (2024)

February 2025 • Fiction

A room has been erected in front of an audience. It's made of concrete, its door is thick like a vault, “a kind of killing jar”. The procedure is simple: the accused (“surplus person”) is brought into the room by two guards, long poles attached to the neck so as to keep their distance. Once placed inside the room, the door is closed. Then, slowly, oxygen is extracted from the room and everyone in attendance waits, long enough for the accused to be deceased. Clean and simple. “Try all they like, the lungs learn they have no job to do.”

The juror reading the verdict in cases like these is a civilian selected from hundreds of candidates through a series of grotesque tests. One of the first steps of the process is agonising enough to make your skin crawl. Every participant is forced to step into a booth for cleaning. The booth then gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and a deep-frequency tone begins and shakes their legs, arms, bones and bowels, so violently their excrements are forced out of their bodies like mayonaise from a tube. Then they are rinsed, dried: ready.

One such person is Abel Cotter, summoned to undergo the prescribed plethora of tests in this harrowing, dystopian future. Cotter, a sanitation worker, cuts a lowly figure. His life is bleak. We don't learn much about it, but we do find out his child was taken from him by the authoritarian state, as his wife and him were deemed emotionally and culturally incompetent.

Cotter passes the tests and is elevated. To pass judgement, he needs to step into the repeat room, in which he gets to experience the defendant's life in order to decide whether they are meant to live or die. Whether they are culled from the community or can proceed to take part.

At this point the book switches perspective, and the tone and style of writing change to reflect the shift to the record of the Black Hill, the experience of the accused. The accused, we learn, grew up in an abusive home, in isolation with his sister, his parents training them with an “electric shock device” and forcing them to act out different fictional characters, like in a play. The accused has never been given a name, only a dossier of roles to memorise (Medellin K, Michael B, Argus F) in a disturbing childhood filled with torture and incest.

Ball's writing throughout it all is rigid, sparse, effective. Very fitting, the way he uses few words to establish a fairly detailed, frightening society of interchangeable robes, telescreens and plastic trays, much of his writing landing with the potency of a punch in the stomach. The second part of the book is shocking and uncomfortable, but convincing: when it started, for a moment, it felt like I was ripped from the book I was reading and plunged into an alternate reality I didn't ask for—much like the inhabitants of Jesse Ball's nightmarish society.

The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball
Published by Catapult in 2024

One book recommendation, once per month.
Book #24 • February 2025