About the book…
What happens in the game, stays in the game…
Rabbits is a secret, dangerous and sometimes fatal underground game. The rewards for winning are unclear, but there are rumours of money, CIA recruitment or even immortality. Or it might unlock the universe’s greatest secrets. But everyone knows that the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes – and the body count is rising. Since the game first started, ten iterations have taken place… and the eleventh round is about to begin.
K can’t get enough of the game and has been trying to find a way in for years. Then Alan Scarpio, reclusive billionaire and alleged Rabbits winner, shows up out of nowhere. And he charges K with a desperate mission. Something has gone badly wrong with the game and K needs to fix it – before Eleven starts – or the world will pay the price.
Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing.
Two weeks after that Eleven begins, so K blows the deadline.
And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.
Huge thanks to Black Crow PR for sending me a gifted review copy of ‘Rabbits’ by Terry Miles, published in June by PanMacmillan/Tor UK!
If you don’t finish this book solidly convinced that the game of Rabbits, or something similar exists or existed, then go back and read it again.
This book is a complete meta fictional-or is it?-recording of the history of this game, how it started and how it gripped the consciousness of nerds. It managed to stay underground, played in secret yet somehow, has caught the mind of conspiracy theorists the world over. And the more into you get, the higher the stakes and yet, there remains no official investigation into the psychological side effects or fatalities ascribed to this game.
No one really knows where it started, the rules of the game are super simple in that no one talks about it ,and it’s a closely guarded secret known only to those who search hard enough to find the clues after the doors to Rabbits opens with a key phrase. And even working out the key phrase is an adventure in itself.
Narrator K’s life has been taken over by the notion of this process-he has always had a propensity for noticing the details that pass others by, and after the death of his parents in his teens, he dives even more deeply into a world of real-or imagined?-patterns like never before.
For example, a game character from a 90’s videogame inexplicably popping up in an arcade game from the 80’s. Or a picture of a bird taken with a camera invented 50 years after the bird went extinct. Or a name in the credits of a film, or tv show, which is a ghost, something which shouldn’t belong.
K becomes immersed in a life where his family is made from the dwellers on the dark side of the internet, the nerds and the geeks who don’t belong anywhere else and see nothing wrong with a life spent unravelling a virtual Gordion Knot.
And as you read, the sense that they are modern day Quixotic gamers dissipates, because you too slip through the cracks in reality being painted on a huge canvas of probability, and begin to wonder what lies behind the fabric of ‘every day life’.
The narrative and quest of this story is fantastic-a reclusive billionaire, who may or may not be the rumoured winner of a previous cycle of Rabbits, appears in an abandoned arcade to ask for K’s help. He tells him Rabbits is broken and then immediately disappears the next day.
It’s left up to K-can he dissociate himself from the situation enough to logically look for a real missing person?
I loved absolutely everything about this book,it messes with your head in the best possible way!
About the author…
Terry Miles is an award-winning filmmaker, creator of the Public Radio Alliance and that network’s series of hit podcasts: Tanis, Rabbits, Faerie, and The Last Movie, and co-creator of The Black Tapes.
He splits his time between the dark emerald gloom of the Pacific Northwest and sunny Los Angeles.
Twitter @panmacmillan @BlackCrowPR @tkmiles @UKTor
Author
bridgeman.lenny@gmail.com