The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Ball, Jesse. The Repeat Room. Catapult, 2024.

Jesse Ball's dystopian novel The Repeat Room defies conventional notions of linearity. The novel is written from both the first-person and third-person points of view and told in the past and present tenses. For the sake of clarity, the following guide relies on the present tense and a linear mode of explanation.

Forty-six-year-old Abel Cotter receives a jury summons. He reports to the local courthouse for the jury selection process. Under the new system, the prospective jurors must undergo a series of tests and examinations until just one juror is chosen to judge the accused. Throughout the process, the jurors try to make sense of what they are experiencing. They have heard horror stories about other jurors' experiences and fear that they might die in the process. Abel maintains a cool demeanor throughout, largely unfazed by the questions the attendants ask or the information they relay to him about the new progressive government.

Roughly two decades prior, Abel and his late wife Elaine had a son. When the baby was one month old, a neighbor called in a complaint about the couple and government officials appeared at their home. The officials then took the Cotters' baby, deeming them unfit parents. Not long later, Elaine left Abel. She struggled to overcome her loss and grief. She died by suicide shortly thereafter.

In the present, Abel feels apathetic to his life. Without his wife and son, he has no reason to live. Therefore, he does not care what happens to him during the selection process. Ultimately, he is chosen as the sole juror. He is then injected with a cocktail of drugs and is told to don a helmet. Via the helmet and drugs, he enters an immersive experience created by the repeat room where the accused stands. Through the repeat room, Abel gains insight into the accused person's past life. He emerges from the experience and meets with a psychologist who urges him to make his decision and decide the accused person's fate.

The narrative shifts into the accused, or the defendant's first-person point of view.

The defendant grew up in a remote location with his unnamed parents and unnamed older sister. From a young age, the siblings' parents forbade them to be themselves. The siblings learned to negate their desires, thoughts, and opinions in order to inhabit a series of characters their parents assigned them. They had to stay in character for the duration of their parents' games or face violent forms of punishment.

One night in the siblings' shared bedroom, the defendant and his sister began a sexual relationship. For the first time, they experienced love and care. They started to rely upon their private evenings together to survive their parents' cruelty.

When the sister was 20 years old, she suggested that she and the defendant kill her on her twenty-first birthday. Two years later, the defendant would also die by suicide in the same manner. The siblings grew hopeful, eagerly anticipating the day they would put their plan into action.

During the sister's birthday dinner, the siblings staged a scene so their parents would send them to their room. In their room, the defendant gave his sister the pills he had stolen from their parents' bathroom. After she took the pills, the siblings lay down on the bed and waited for the pills to take effect. They held hands and talked until the sister died. In the morning, their parents found the defendant holding his sister's dead body on the bedroom floor. The father immediately called the authorities, accusing him of murder.

Now on trial, the defendant holds that he has been awaiting death since his sister's death. Being with her is the only happiness he has ever known.