Review: Rabbits by Terry Miles
File under: What the HELL did I just read?
TL;DR
My personal review: 5 out of 5 stars.
Recommended if: You enjoy reality-bending meta horror like House of Leaves, or books about puzzles, gaming, and 80s/90s nostalgia like Ready Player One
Skip it if: You don’t enjoy books like House of Leaves or Ready Player One, you prefer a simple, straightforward narrative, or you have a low threshhold for tragedy/creep factor
It’s been a long time since I read a book straight through in a single day. But this one, I just couldn’t put down. From page one the story was full of absurd mysteries and colorful characters, and it just kept building from there.
This one is hard to pull into a concise summary (especially without spoilers), but I’ll try:
Essentially, the book is about a meta-game called Rabbits, which may or may not be a QAnon-like conspiracy cult, following clues which may or may not have been placed by a shadowy Illuminati-like cabal, which may or may not be based on ancient metaphysical rituals designed maintain the stability of the Universe. The protagonist and narrator, who goes only by the initial K, may or may not suffer from repeated breaks from reality. And finally, playing the game may or may not be making people go insane and/or die. There is never a time in this book when you can feel sure that you know what’s really going on, and personally, I loved that.
When I was in college, a couple of my friends and I spent months immersed in a somewhat obscure internet puzzle game called Notpron. If you’ve never played it, it basically consists of a series of numbered webpages where you have to solve a riddle posed by each in order to make your way to the next one. Solving the puzzles starts out easily (a hidden button in the image, perhaps), but gets harder as the levels go on. You may have to recognize patterns in the image, or use tools outside of the game. At the time when the internet was relatively new, it was also a way to learn about the structures and processes that made it possible, and to learn different and creative ways of engaging with it. For example, I learned how to download files, convert their formats, and view them in different programs, how to find interpreters for common codes like morse and binary, how to find and understand the developer view of a webpage.
The puzzles in this book reminded me of Notpron puzzles: to solve them, you had to draw on knowledge from outside the puzzle, and it may not be knowledge you already had. You had to find patterns in things that you may not immediately think to put together. And around it all there was this air of mystique, that no one knew what would happen when you got to the end. The book has all of these elements, but amplified by about a hundred, with much higher stakes.
Aside from the puzzles, I would note that the major strength of this book was in the author’s grasp of the uncanny. It’s easy to go for jump scares or gross-out horror, but this book takes the harder, and in my opinion, more rewarding, road. Miles gives us page after page filled with small, unexpected examples of fundamental wrongness in the world surrounding K, that ultimately combine to give the book its existentially eerie feel. Some were glaringly obvious, like a painting hung upside down in a waiting room, but others were more subtle. At first, I thought the narrative style was too choppy, jumping back and forth in time and between sets of characters— but then I realized that, whether intentional or not, it helped contribute to the feel of the book. It helped us experience the uncertainty always lurking behind K’s reality. One of the most famous players of the game is named Hazel, which is also the name one of the main (rabbit) characters in Watership Down. It became kind of a game for me to hunt for the meta references, the hidden double meanings, and recognize them when they happened.
That’s the thing about Rabbits— it has you playing the game even as you’re reading it. Like in House of Leaves, the reader becomes part of the story whether they want to be or not. Numerous times in the book the players consider the proposition that they should stop playing, but how can you stop playing when the game is everywhere, in everything?
From the minute you pick up this book, I promise you’ll be down the rabbit hole too. And, like me, you’ll enjoy every minute of it!