Into the decaying American town of Morteville drives an elegant saturnine
stranger, Dr Ivor Coughin, bringing an audacious proposal for the town’s main
employer, a failing textile factory with an unhealthy work-force. The proposal: to divert the factory’s pension fund to finance a suicide parlor. Following the state’s recent enactment of a ‘Death With Dignity’ Act, Sunset Parlor will provide ‘the Passing of their choice’ for terminally ill patients who have the legal right to physician-assisted suicide.
Sunset Parlor opens its doors a few months later, with an all-girls marching band and a tour of the facilities. An aggressive marketing campaign, offering all kinds of inducements and discounts, persuades terminal patients to enrol, some of them reluctantly. The fees are high, but the patients can choose to have every kind of last wish gratified –spiritual Passings with bells and gongs, convivial Group Passings, erotic Passings with strippers and lap-dancers. Every taste will be catered for.
Before the first Passing can take place, Sunset Parlor has attracted media attention from all round the world, especially as there are sometimes violent demonstrations for and against it, by evangelical Christians led by a fervent pastor on the one hand, and by ‘Pro-choicers’ on the other.
The fervent pastor plans a grand protest demonstration on the eve of the first Passing, but Dr Coughin arranges for his exposure as a hypocrite on national television, and the protest collapses.
The first patients depart together immediately afterwards in a Group Passing with discounts for donating their organs, giving last-minute interviews or permitting their final moments to be viewed by fee-paying members of the public.
Soon desperate terminal patients are flocking into Morteville from all over to get the departure they want – or their relatives want for them. From being a rust-belt town with a sunset industry, Morteville swiftly becomes a prosperous sunrise community with a novel kind of service industry. New hotels go up, tourism flourishes, testamentary lawyers, morticians and bereavement counselors blossom along its once derelict Main Street. Casinos and nightclubs open, for not all the bereaved are inconsolable, especially if they stand to inherit from their departing Loved Ones. Soon new branches of Sunset Parlor are opening in one town after another throughout the state.
But Dr Coughin has higher ambitions. Why shouldn’t the strict regulations governing physician-assisted suicide be relaxed to allow more deaths with dignity? Why shouldn’t the federal government be involved? Think of the savings to the nation in these hard times if sick unhappy people, even though not terminally ill, whose lives are only a burden to themselves, their relatives and - worst of all - the nation’s taxpayers, are helped to end their suffering in the way they wish!
Now begins a lobbying campaign in the capital. Selected senators are invited to tour Sunset Parlor, where each is pampered according to his or her predilection, and before long the President himself visits and is persuaded - he will nominate Dr Coughin for the post of Secretary for Health.
There are however two obstacles to Dr Coughin’s triumphal progress: the disgraced and now born-again pastor is plotting to ‘wreak The Lord’s Vengeance’ on Sunset Parlor, and a junior vice-president of the textile company is a whistle-blower, pointing her finger at the misappropriation of the factory’s pension fund and the use of a banned toxic dye that has led to several workers’ deaths. Dr Coughin has to arrange a fatal fire and a car accident to deal with these nuisances. Then, finally secure, he is appointed Secretary for Health and soon starts eyeing the Presidency itself.
A biting satire on the commercial exploitation of death, Sunset Parlor also obliquely raises questions about the ethics of euthanasia. Not abstractly, but through scenes ranging from comic to tragic played out by a cast of vivid
