What would you do if the fate of the world depended on winning an ancient alternate reality game? Would you play even as your fellow players disappeared or turned up dead? Or would you leave the game to providence?
Rabbits by Terry Miles / Image credit: Pan Macmillan
Rabbits by Terry Miles is The Matrix meets Ready Player One, with a bit of Stranger Things thrown in. Based on a series of podcasts Miles produced, it’s all about a neurodivergent uber-geek named K with an obsession for patterns who ends up getting pulled into the world of the mysterious game unofficially known as Rabbits by the eccentric billionaire Alan Scarpio.
There’s something wrong with the game, however, and it’s up to K to fix it before the end of the world arrives. But when it appears the latest iteration is killing people, K has a difficult choice to make.
Rabbits is one intense thriller, managing to weave soft sci-fi with skin-crawling horror, while at the same time telling a rather charming love story and perpetuating fascinating urban myths. An alternate reality game is usually only fun for the player; how do you describe finding clues online and in other technological mediums while remaining engaging to a reader in a non-interactive capacity?
It shouldn’t be possible. This should be boring as heck. But somehow Terry Miles pulls us into these digital and analog worlds without alienating us, and we start to feel like we’re the computer whizzes of the story. Sure it helps if you have an average user knowledge of computers, and are old enough to understand references to various outdated technology such as floppy disks and cassette tapes. But you hardly have to be a darknet genius (or even fully understand the concept of an ARG) to get totally sucked into this story.
On a philosophical level, Rabbits has some interesting themes. We are forced to think about our relationship with our individual realities, what reality really means, and what mysterious extradimensional forces might be behind strange phenomena like the Mandela Effect, déjà vu and weird synchronicities we experience in our everyday lives that we’d usually brush off as mere coincidences.
It’s made more impactful by references to popular phenomena like the Berenstain Bears, and Shazaam and Sinbad (very well explained in the book but you can Google them if they mean nothing to you), and the creation of weird new cases surrounding famous figures like Steely Dan, Richard Linklater, David Bowie and Jeff Goldblum. It feels bizarrely and boldly meta, but the result is this effect of the story blending with the real world of the reader, further feeding into our loosening grasp on reality.
The relationship between K and his friend Chloe follows that awesome trope of geeky boy somehow manages to steal the heart of rebel girl (who’s secretly a geek under the punk exterior). It’s amusingly unoriginal, but who cares? You can’t help but root for this innocent, blooming love.
Rabbits is absolutely exhilarating from start to… Well, towards the end anyway. Unfortunately, the ending presents us with a vague mish-mash of sci-fi concepts that offers neither clarity nor any real kind of resolution. I feel a lot of questions were left unanswered, but I thoroughly enjoyed the ride anyway.
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Certainly, I haven’t felt this paranoid about a fictitious story since the Final Destination movies. I flinch every time I see or hear a mention of “rabbits”. I’m an absolute mess of a human being thanks to Terry Miles - and that’s probably the highest compliment an author can get.
“Out in the real world, talking about it made you feel exposed, like you were standing too close to something dangerous, leaning out just a bit too far on the platform while listening to the rumble of the approaching train.”
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