Robert McGillReseñas

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a darkly seriocomic take on the pandemic, suicide, body dysmorphia, immigration, the meaning of family, relationships, parenting, and more. Canadian eighteen year old, highly discouraged, injured distance runner Regan plans her suicide-by-flatpack, in which a person infected with “the worm” is compressed into a plastic wrapped tube and shipped to a buyer seeking companionship. Officially discontinued after off-gassing began killing recipients and inflated flat-packers alike, the flat-pack dark web supplies Regan with, first, Ülle, then Jari, then a baby. Defying convention, Ülle regains memories of her life before being flat-packed, and Regan doesn’t die from off-gassing. The black marketeers and the flat-packers’ family matriarch opt to kill her themselves.

The tight narrative comments broadly on the mishandling of the COVID pandemic and on migration, as infected people are relocated to another country to which they arrive pre-assimilated, without memories or history. Societal themes of family and success are framed by Regan’s relationship with her absent parents, her curtailed running career and related eating disorder, and her desire for human connection which ultimately overrules her desire to end it all.

Robert McGill has written a gruesomely witty story of one person’s experience, with wide-ranging implications for the rest of us.

It's hard to describe the inventive plot line without giving too much away - although I will say that the tagline of the book being, "A bold and absurd new take on the dystopian plague novel, where people are treated like IKEA furniture" did very little to prepare me for the actual focus of the book. The text alternates chapters between telling the "modern day" story and letters to a "young one" filling in past context. Both threads converge towards the end of the book, tying all the various characters together in a way I didn't expect. It's a dark book, but told in a way that makes the darkness as just a reality and part of life. It touches on suicide, eating disorders, loneliness, global pandemics, black market gangsters, and family relationships. The alternating chapters kept me, at first, from really getting into the book, but it's well-written with engaging characters, and despite the darkness, the unfolding plot kept me going and enjoying it (so to speak).

Regan decides to commit suicide due to many problems and a plague, she orders a “flatpack” which is a blow up of a once upon a time human, to make her end “comfortable.” Once she opens the box, which the flatpack is distributed in, this novel take off and does not stop or disappoint.

I loved this book and hated for it to end. I would like to say how in awe I am of Robert Gill’s story telling - just wonderful.

Thank you LibraryThing for the opportunity to read this wonderful book

This book takes an interesting premise - people can be treated like IKEA furniture and be shipped around the world in flat-pack boxes - and an intriguing structure to keep the reader engaged in the story from beginning to end. There is the character of Regan, a former runner contemplating suicide, and Ulle who finds themselves playing a role in Regan's final days. It's surreal, poignant, and a worthwhile read.

I love truly novel and creative concepts, and this book is definitely that! It's a fascinating concept, exploring what could happen if we were able to put people into long term storage and bring them out again. It was an enjoyable read with some interesting twists and turns. As an engineer, I would have loved to know more about the flatpacking (and unpacking) process and the plague that drove people to it, but that's not really the point. This isn't a sci-fi story, it's a people story. The main character, Regan, was well-developed with personality and history and motivations, so that I cared about her even if I didn't really relate to her. The flatpacked woman, Ulle, was likewise well fleshed out and sympathetic, and I was happy to see her get more empowered through the course of the book. Overall a fun ride, I would recommend.

**LibraryThing Early Reviewers Win**

I cannot begin to tell you what a weird, wacky, and wonderfully sinister book this is. I was hooked from the moment I began to read it. Set in a dystopian future where people are flat-packed like Ikea furniture, they have some sort of parasite that leaks (off-gasses) and can kill others. If that doesn't interest you, I don't know what will.

There are a few explanations that could use some clearing up but, follow along and you'll find yourself really emersed in this story of Reagan and her mental state; this could be hard for some readers who find reading about suicide difficult.

There are some very interesting concepts in this book regarding how we see ourselves and each other as well as how we view the concepts of death and killing of oneself. Overall, I was so pleased with this book.

**All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Ever notice how it seems that, pretty much no matter what a new technology is invented for, someone will discover other uses for it, and some of those uses may become as (or more) popular than the intended? That's sort of what happens here with "flatpacking".

At its core, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is the stories of two young women, struggling and persisting through two very different collections of oppressively unfair life circumstances, until multiple highly "off-label" uses of "flatpacking" pull their two lives and struggles into close contact, forever changing both in unexpected—and arguably "suitable" if not ideally happy—ways.

Plenty of other factors, including a decimating "worm" epidemic, very real (but not story-bludgeoning) elements of body dysmorphia and anorexia nervosa, multiple forms of family/parental neglect, and a hopeless addict with his weird "horseshoe" drug, all add dimension and drivers to different parts of the story, making for an interesting, colorful, depiction of believably real human problems struggling in a slightly weirded near-future world.

I agree with Zadie Smith's cited quotation that Robert McGill, in assembling this very creative and very human story, does indeed "know what he's doing".

One quibble: the tagline description "where people are treated like IKEA furniture" is much overstated. The story stands out well enough on its own without this misleading hyperbole.

A brief dystopian novel. It alternates between two stories which become related. For much of the novel the reader puzzles out the contexts and relation as she goes, but much becomes clearer by the end. The central conceits involve an fatal parasitic epidemic and one response, which is to "flatpack" in the hope that a cure which occur and the future which will allow a flatpacked person to be revived and cured. Even saying that much is a bit of a spoiler, as nothing is explained for the reader.

Probably my favorite touch is the drug "horseshoe" which is applied by tattoo and which temporarily gives the user the belief that he can read the minds of others, though the belief is probably false.

The book reads quickly and I found it involving as I read it. It didn't fully engage me when I was away from the book, but I didn't do it any favors but when in my reading I read it. (I was also reading Middlemarch. It is no great shade on A Suitable Companion to suggest I think Middlemarch is better.)

There are a number of touching moments, especially if you find any pathos in the reactivated flatpacked people, who are at various stages of mental acuity. I also think some readers will the surreal / science fiction aspects funny or sly but others won't.

If the book sounds interesting to you I suggest picking it up.

For disclosure I am writing this review as part of the first reviewers program in exchange for a free copy of the book. I am writing this review without positive or negative influence for this copy. A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is critically acclaimed for being "Unpredictable and completely original" and the writer being "of striking talent and originality" and "refuses to keep things straight, and for this produces freshly captivating effects." As a novel I do find it different from my usual reading tastes, and there are readers who this style will resonate with. I am not among them. I must note that I received and uncorrected proof; there may have been edits I am not aware of before the final release.

The plot is reasonably straightforward. A depressed teen named Regan who has an absentee mother and a drug addict father has built her self-worth around her high school track career. Before the story begins she suffered an injury that makes it impossible for her to run, thus making the one things she values in life incredibly painful and perhaps beyond her ability to recover. She decides to kill herself in a manner that she has been told is painless and mildly euphoric. She will order a 'flatpack,' (although it takes us a third of the book to understand what this really means), and as a by product of inflating a human person, a gas will be released that will slowly kill her over three days. Of course, it turns out that the flatpack she receives comes along with developing memories and the promised gassing doesn't go as planned. There is a parallel narrative that is a flashback to the life of the woman in the flatpack, how her country is ravaged by a plague and how she escapes the country, eventually revealing how she wound up in the flatpack that is delivered to Regan's home. At the same time, there is a shadowy figure of the online seller who means to ensure that Regan doesn't escape her chosen demise or tell anyone outside what is going on.

I found the side by side narrative's jarring. The alternating chapters go from Regan's PoV to narration by Ülle. Ülle's chapters are weird. Even as narration, Ülle speaks of her life in the third person. Though there is dialogue of a sort, it is without punctuation since it is being relayed through a third party. The extended nature of this 'story' felt tedious to me as I connected more closely to the 'action' of Regan's story.

Both characters are mostly passive, barely doing more than reacting to the events that happen around them. Even as problems grow around Regan, she reflects that she is a failure and can't even do this right. The looming threat of the 'dealer's goon' keeps her from leaving her house, or reaching out to others, or trying to take any action. Ülle's backstory chapters show her as a passive servant who comes from her village to work for a couple, and then later marries the husband after his wife's death. She moves from nanny to housekeeper, and it takes two interludes before there is real conversation between her and her husband. She does, at least, become an active participant in the current storyline by the end of the novel.

I also wonder how much the author researched the issue of teenage suicide, particularly among young women. This is a wide-ranging issue that affects millions of people around the world, and should be handled with sensitivity. Regan seems almost cliché. We check all of the boxes of parental absence, hating her appearance, feeling that nobody cares for her - or if they do show they care she thinks they are merely going through the motions. We talk about her eating - or really calorie counting lack thereof. She has a therapist who she says much have had an 'off day' since he didn't pick up on her suicide idealization before she decided on her method.

We also have the author telling a story of an immigrant experience, fleeing a country full of plague and trying to escape to a better life in America (which sometimes sounds more like they are talking about Canada). Once again, however, we have what could be a engaging story of loss and desperation smoothed over into a quiet story-telling narration.

In the end I feel like this was an interesting concept (especially from the description) that was poorly executed, perhaps in the name of being genre or narrative subverting. Passive characters and stereotypes make the book feel shallow, and the seeming contradictions in the 'flatpacking' that is essential to the story makes it seem to lack internal consistency that defies disbelief.½

I didn't hesitate to finish this book, but I'm not sure I liked it. I think it's an intriguing concept, but I wish there was more story. Clearly there was some type of plague, but we don't know anything about it really. And then one response to this was to "flatpack" people, but why? What were they hoping to achieve? What did they think would happen? Clearly it didn't unfold the way they thought...but why? So many questions that I feel like could have been answered but weren't. This could have been phenomenal, but I just didn't really connect with it.

A quick, interesting read with an unusual premise. When I finished, all I could think is what the heck did I just read and how will I ever write a decent review of this? The story is both fascinating and disturbing, and I was compelled to keep reading to see which way the plot would twist. Because this story is on the shorter side, it lacks some of the character development I would have preferred, and it ended with more questions than answers. I would recommend this to fans of dystopian or science fiction literature.½

This futuristic novel has a strange premise as a plot device. Humans are "flatpacked" to escape a plague with the idea of being reconstituted later. Problems ensue. Not a bad idea, but the story and characters were not personally compelling to me. Suicidal ideation, depression, drug abuse, and eating disorders stack up pretty damn heavily in this story. A weird little 200-page book.

Quirky, strange, original. I usually enjoy dystopian stories, so this one drew me in and kept me interested enough to read it quickly. Fans of creepy dark books should give it a try.½

I received this book for free from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review. I found the premise of the book interesting, however, it took some effort to stick with it as many of the characters were not easy to like. I kept going mostly to figure out the backstory of how Ulle and the others were flatpacked. Without getting into spoilers, I didn’t really find the ending hopeful. Perhaps it’s that dystopian novels aren’t really my genre. Good world building, and definitely an interesting and unique concept. Too depressing for me though.½

This was definitely an interesting concept for a near-future, dystopian novel. Because you don’t have all of background on how or why flatpacking exists from the beginning, I felt really drawn in, wanting to know more about that context. I enjoyed getting Ülle’s backstory, as well as Regan’s. While I wish the ending had been a little bit more flushed out, I think it was an appropriate way to end the story.

I got a kind of Etgar Keret vibe from this book, but if one of Keret's middling short stories was lengthened. Obviously a tale about suicide via inhaling vapors that flatpacked humans (who are also alive in their way) give off is absurd, but that's as crazy as the story gets. There's more absurdist touches, but nothing else hits quite that level. The ending was very unsatisfying though.

This is one of the most unique stories that I have ever read. It is a creative look at how a society chooses to deal with a plague and the aftereffects of their decisions. It is also about a young girl who is dealing with mental illness. While the two stories are different from one another, the author brings them together quite well. My only critique is with the ending. It left me with so many questions, but perhaps that was the intent. If so, I wish it would have been a little more obvious, otherwise, I wish it would have had a more final conclusion. That said, I did enjoy this read!

Many thanks to LibraryThing and Coach House Books for providing this free ARC. This review consists of my own thoughts and is free from outside influence.

This is a quirky and dark take on how people respond to things like a deadly plague juxta positioned against teen/young adult angst. Regan has been rejected by her parents and her attempts to control her life (anorexia, perfectionism, relationships) have left her suicidal. But her attempt to take her life via flatpack exposure instead drags her back into the land of the living - sort of. I can't say I felt satisfied at the end of the novel, but I appreciated the places the story took my thoughts.

I really loved this weird little novel. It follows Reagan a teenager who is contemplating suicide in a near future scenario where plagues have created a darkweb business that specializes in Ikea-Packed people who act as suicide companions. The truth of the system is darker than it at first even seems. This novel is a dark and darkly-funny tale of family, suicide, and at least to this reader, what compromise means in the face of helping others.

Regan has a high school education, an eating disorder, injuries that prevent her from doing track—the thing she was counting on for college, especially after her addict father spent her college fund—and an empty house with her parents off at rehab and work overseas. She decides to end her life by ordering a flatpack—a human who was preserved via a process that flattens them in order to save them from an epidemic, but the process turned out to emit toxic fumes when reversed, making flatpacks into contraband. (Why they can’t reverse the process via machine and keep the person isolated until that dissipates is not made clear.) But the person who arrives, Ülle, turns out to have some memories and interests of her own, and then more flatpacks start showing up, pushing Regan into trying to help them despite the threats of the mysterious dealer who provided them. Ülle’s story also is woven throughout—her survival of the epidemic in a vaguely Nordic country, her survival-based entanglement with a mob boss type, and how she ended up a flatpack. Human connection wins out something something—it didn’t really grab me.

A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life is a quick read that focuses on the story of its main characters over dystopian worldbuilding. The chapters alternate between two timelines - this is a storytelling device that I usually enjoy, but I absolutely wasn’t expecting it here and I’m not sure if it was 100% effective as so many questions were left unanswered. Overall, I enjoyed it though. You don’t need all of the answers or background in a short read and the main story of Reagan/Ulle was satisfying.½

4 stars, Easy way to suicide

A SUITABLE COMPANION FOR THE END OF YOUR LIFE
by Robert Mcgill

What if there was an easy way to suicide? All you had to do was place an order and a few days later, your life ended.

Reagan is a long-distance runner, who has suffered an injury and is no longer able to run. She believes that is all she has to live for. She doesn't have anyone that really cares about her, so she decides to take the easy way out.

She never expected to care about anyone new.

This is an interesting take on a #dystopian future. Definitely readable, I'll probably re-read it in the future.

I received a complimentary copy of #asuitablecompanionfortheendofyourlife by #robertmcgill from #coachhousebooks I was not obligated to post a review.

#darklycomic #strongfemaleprotagonist #triggerwarning

A sad dystopian novel about a young woman who wants to end her life, but not alone. Flatpacking is where people in a foreign country are shipped to Canada where people wish to die. It's a very selfish thing, but Regan learns that maybe there's a reason to live.

It's an interesting concept, though I'm not sure I fully comprehend it all. And while I didn't really care about any of the characters, I wanted to know what happened next, so I guess that had something good going for it. And the ending was somewhat ambiguously interesting. But overall, didn't seem to deliver on its cool premise.

This book throws you into the plot right away, without much of an introduction. However, there was never so little info that I was overly confused - bits of information about the world are slowly revealed as the narrative progresses. The desire to learn more about the world - along with the interesting concept behind the story - pushed me to keep reading.

The book is structured so that there is a chapter of the main story described in the synopsis, a chapter describing Ülle's past life, a chapter of the main story, a chapter on Ülle's past, & so on. Having this window into Ülle's past helped me understand her (& some of the other characters) better & aided with world building, therefore overall enhancing the main story.

The characters are intriguing in their own ways. I appreciated the realistic depiction of Regan's mental illness (it could get quite heavy, but that was not a surprise based on the provided synopsis). Not all of the characters were likeable, but it didn't seem like they were supposed to be loved by the reader. Instead, they aided in driving the story along.

The ending seemed a bit rushed, & I still have some unanswered questions about the world (e.g., how was it discovered that flatpacking was a means to combat the pandemic?). However, I overall greatly enjoyed this book. If the description sounds at all interesting to you, I would definitely recommend reading it.½