I would like to thank Stephen from Black Crow PR and Del Ray for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Tor UK

Published – Out now

Price – £16.99 hardback £8.99 Kindle eBook

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.

Have you ever been obsessed by something that seems fairly innocuous but then takes over your life? A TV show and it’s long history? A band and the meaning of every song and every single performance. Perhaps that infamous browse of Wikipedia to look something up and then an hour and many many links later you discover all this weird stuff linked together. Humans love a puzzle to solve and if we are not paying attention then we can commit too much time to it. In Rabbits by Terry Miles we are taken on a dark path to solve a puzzle that may change reality and could threaten the world.

K is a thirtysomething who made money from share trading thanks to their unusual gift for spotting pattens and now lives for a different kind of game – researching the sixty year old game known as Rabbits. Rabbits is a mystery spoken of only in weird corners of the dark net and ever shifts through history and rumour. A game that requires players to construct links and links out of coincidences and obscure clues some of which require reality to have been shifted or huge resources to fake. If though you can win you can be very wealthy and powerful. K has really just been an observer of the game regaling other gamers with their knowledge of the history and strangeness of its various iterations but when multi-billionaire Alan Scarpio turns up and asks K for help investigating what is going wrong with the game it sets in motion a series of disappearances, mysterious deaths and changes to reality from movies that no one now remembers to Bowie being alive – Rabbits has begun the new game and K finds out someone is keen this time to make the game and possibly the world fall apart.

Rabbits is an intriguing and ambitious tale knitting out of fifty odd years of culture a decent game history that uses clues in the web, art, media and even just on the street to suggest our reality is weirder than you think. Miles services from stoner filled gaming arcades to cults to corporations pulling all the threads together and nothing stays fixed forever. In fact, as we get the story from K’s point of view then we even see them experience reality changing around them – a building may lose an entire floor, or a strange malevolent presence can be felt. K tells us not just the history of this bizarre game and its players but their own personal relationship that covers not just growing up but hidden family relationships hinting at a larger story under the surface. It is very kinetic style of storytelling moving location to location and back and forward in K’s or the game’s life. This successfully keeps the reader on their toes trying to work out the strange clues that evolve. We feel K’s bewilderment as they start to lose their own grip on reality and their friends start to get concerned or perhaps find the current one no longer matches their memories.

There is though a slight elephant in the room I better get out of the way. A lot of clues reference pop culture and it is hard not to think of Ready Player One as we get K explaining famous or mildly obscure movies, games or books. A Watchman reference here, some old computer games there and after a while it does feel a little too close in approach to ignore RP1 but the story gets much more interesting when the culture gets played with rather than worshipped. Miles though can create some weird horror instead as time changes or characters find themselves driving down roads with no lights or being chased by something that wants to end you are written very well and disturbing without the need to link everything to an obscure fact every few pages and that saves the story from becoming a drain. Then the story moves neatly from thriller to horror and while RP1 is all about warm glows of nostalgia here we get something a little darker and stranger. Although after a while the cycle of MK Ultra experiments, cults and billionaires to meet can appear that we are going through the classic conspiracy tropes too. I’m not sure I needed the kitchen sink throw at me every few pages and perhaps those constant reference get in the way of a story rather than embed it in our world!

Rabbits is a strange and weird thrill ride going in unusual directions and stylishly giving the reader a puzzle to solve. Fans of the podcast this came from get a different story but with many nods to it. The limitation is with its love of finding links within pop culture and need to explain itself that sometimes it feels all for effect rather than exploring why people get obsessed but when it cuts loose and plays with horror and changes to reality it gets to create a much more interesting tale. It’s an unusual story that you’re going to be surprised by and also want to solve yourself just don’t start trying to link all events together.