Rabbits by Terry Miles

It’s an average work day. You’ve been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air–4:44 pm. You go to check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize it is April 4th–4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444. Coincidence? Or have you just seen the edge of a rabbit hole?

Rabbits is a mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses our global reality as its canvas. Since the game first started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. Their identities are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes. Players have died in the past–and the body count is rising.

And now the eleventh round is about to begin. Enter K–a Rabbits obsessive who has been trying to find a way into the game for years. That path opens when K is approached by billionaire Alan Scarpio, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration. Scarpio says that something has gone wrong with the game and that K needs to fix it before Eleven starts or the whole world will pay the price.

Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing. Two weeks after that, K blows the deadline and Eleven begins. And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.

Let’s start simple; Rabbits is one weird book. The good news is that I’m all about weird. People that know me can confirm that weird is very much my wheelhouse.

Over many years a strange game called Rabbits has been played across the world. It is only ever discussed in hushed tones by those in the know. The secrecy that surrounds the game is what makes it so enticing. The latest round of the game is about to begin. Unfortunately for us, something is going wrong and it has the potential to be extremely bad news for the human race.

We view the intricacies of the game through the eyes of a character only ever referred to as K. Rabbits has built up its own complex mythology over the decades and K is utterly obsessed with that lore. I couldn’t help but be a little sad for K. He is compelled to seek patterns in all things and there is a sense that the game has taken hold of his entire existence. It is fascinating from a reader’s perspective, however. K is driven by a desire for answers and that desire leads him down a life-altering rabbit hole. Pun intended.

What of the game itself? How do you play Rabbits? How do you win? What does it all mean? I got the distinct impression that trying to answer any/all of these questions means you are already playing. The game is more about the journey than the destination. Infuriating, I know but in the best of ways. K’s journey involves everything from random acts of Jeff Goldblum related violence, tram stops that shouldn’t exist on the Seattle Center Monorail, and the headache-inducing concept of false memory syndrome.

I don’t think Rabbits is the sort of book you read. It is more of an experience you have to dive into and see where it takes you. What exactly is going on? Is K starring in the abyss of complex multiverse theory, experiencing ripples of déjà vu, or is the whole thing the ultimate joke of an omnipotent higher power? There is so much to consider. Thinking about it, that may be the best way to describe Rabbits. It’s a book for people who enjoy a right good think about things.

It is extremely likely that Rabbits is going to fall into that genre fiction category I like to call literary marmite. Some readers are going to embrace the mind-bending adventure that explores the interconnectedness of all things, while others will refuse to engage and hate it with a passion. I fall squarely into the first category. Personally, I rather like books that elicit such strong reactions in readers. A large part of my lifelong love affair with the written word is that books have the remarkable ability to change your perception of the world. They prompt you to learn, to think and to question. I’ll admit that Rabbits left me with more questions than answers but I’m totally ok with that.

It’s just occurred to me, there is something from recent memory that might help to give you a bit of extra context about where this book fits. If you watched and enjoyed the brilliant 2020 television show DEVS created by Alex Garland, then I think Rabbits might just be the book for you. Both cover similar thematic ground. Sort of.

I’ll be honest, I could waffle endlessly about this book. This has only ever happened a few times before in my life. I have a memory of boring people endlessly years ago when I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I’m still annoyed to this day I let someone borrow the book and it disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I apologise, I digress. My point is that T K Miles narrative has left me much the same way as Shea and Wilson’s writing did. To a tired old would-be non-conformist such as myself, Rabbits is the sort of fiction I love to revel in. So many ideas to explore about where we fit in the grand scheme of things. I love it. As an aside, can someone explain to me why this has recently appeared on my arm after reading the book?*

Rabbits is published by Macmillan and is available now. Highly recommended. In fact, I’ll go further. This is a strong contender for my book of the year and we are only in early June.

Regular readers of The Eloquent Page know I like to pair any book I read with a suitable musical accompaniment. When it comes to Rabbits I was spoiled for choice. There are a handful of references to music in the novel itself which I duly listened to. It was nice to revisit Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre. Discovering the trippy majesty of Songs of Innocence by David Axelrod was awesome. Ultimately however my own music recommendation is the soundtrack to Donnie Darko by Michael Andrews. It has a weird, otherworldly vibe and a giant rabbit on the cover. Perfect fit or cosmic coincidence? I’ll let you decide.

*Ok, so technically it is a hare rather than a rabbit but the opportunity to work it into the review was too good to miss.