n a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant's lived experience, to see as if through their eyes. The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel's shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy's broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.
Ball’s stripped-down surrealism gives way to stream-of-consciousness prose poetry from the point of view of the accused ... Both halves are expertly written, and the second is visceral and moving. But do the halves form a whole? ... Ball certainly caught something here. The Repeat Room is compelling, eerie and dreamlike, even if, like a dream, the parts don’t fully cohere.
This is a speculative fiction with the brevity and depth of a fable ... A compelling fable about the nature of fiction, including the fiction that is memoir: about what it can and cannot tell us, and what we must decide to do with that imperfect knowledge.
Ball’s vision is chilling, his writing flawless in this stark, grueling tale of humans bereft of care and compassion, of love denied, sanity endangered, and judgement weaponized.
