Checking Out of the Hotel Euthanasia is a fictional satirical novel about assisted dying.
The Hotel Euthanasia welcomes you through the its splendid doors for a life changing stay. We just can't promise you won't die of laughter before it's time to leave.
Checking Out of the Hotel Euthanasia takes us 21 years into the future to tell the bizarre tales of the guests that come for the most decadent death that money can buy, personalized to the customer's self-indulgent desires - however weird those may be.
This satirical comedy follows Rab and his crazy Scottish cronies on their adventure to blow up Hotel Euthanasia in revenge for the assisted killing of his parents. Rab, the protagonist, moves from reason to emotion stimulated by loss, anger and a quest for revenge. Along the way we find ourselves tripping over deep-rooted views, bumping into uneasy feelings and discover ourselves lost along the winding path of reality. You may just challenge your preconceptions as you turn down a subterranean twist in the tale.
The effective juxtaposition of humour and death, challenges and entertains in a way that engages the reader making a difficult subject accessible. It simply lays it all out bare - the ridiculousness, the sadness, the motives and the defeat, all felt by his characters. "With choice and free will the only thing you can be sure of is uncertainty." The Hotel Euthanasia forces us to question our beliefs in a world full of craziness, where nothing's ever as straightforward as it may seem.
"Checking Out of the Hotel Euthanasia", uses humour to explores the various considerations involved in assisted dying including choice, reason, emotion, religion, capitalism, politics, philosophy, morality, relationships, loss and chaos. Iconoclastic humour smashes the idols of conventional wisdom moving the reader to new thought processes.
Fun is poked mercilessly at various institutions from communism, anarchy, religion, consumerism and capitalism. Politics is unmasked to reveal vested interests along with the eventual insidious corruption of capitalism. The complexity of relationships are explored through events and pressures on various characters. from the family man with motor neuron disease to the autistic spectrum customer care manager of the Hotel Euthanasia who is detached from life and death. Beliefs and values about the sanctity of life and right to choose are deconstructed in various story lines to reveal moral dilemmas.
So, can a fictional comedy about assisted dying be taken seriously? The opportunity to be entertained will certainly make the subject more accessible. Emotionally engage and root for the characters with their various thoughts about death, assisted dying and humanity. Their idiosyncrasies and motivations are explored through absurdity and chaos to realize an explosion of ideas. We are, after all, the animal that laughs!
