A twisty, timey-wimey roller coaster that morphs seamlessly from treasure hunt to conspiracy thriller to escape room.
The creator of the absorbing podcast Rabbits expands its mythology about an ancient and potentially deadly game.
Debut novelist Miles is known for creating hit podcasts, and while this peculiar augmentation doesn’t quite stick the landing, its premise is spellbinding. Its namesake podcast is a missing persons mystery, but this sidequel digs far deeper into the mysteries surrounding the clandestine alternative-reality game at its heart. The narrator identifies himself only as K, and he’s fascinated by any threads of information about the unnamed game, known to players colloquially as “Rabbits.” Egged on by a video-arcade owner named the Magician, K, his girlfriend, Chloe, and pal Baron search out more information about the game as things get more dangerous for all of them. There’s not much to go on: The first recorded modern instance of the game emerged in 1959; a fractured recording lays out a few more clues, and readers learn more from interstitial notes by Hazel, the winner of the eighth iteration. Things start getting serious when K is approached in the arcade by the alleged winner of the sixth game, Alan Scarpio, “a gazillionaire playboy who hangs out with Johnny Depp,” who nonchalantly says, “Something is wrong with Rabbits, and I need you to help me fix it.” It’s believed that the game’s 10th iteration has ended, and a new round seems to be beginning when players solve a series of obscure riddles, followed by a cryptic pronunciation: “The door is open.” While not as pop-culture inundated as Ready Player One, the book nods to eccentric influences like the urban legend Polybius, about a mind-altering arcade game; the novels Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski; and, most tellingly, the cult movie Donnie Darko: “The Venn diagram of people interested in Rabbits and in Richard Kelly’s sci-fi thriller from 2001 is essentially just a circle.”
A twisty, timey-wimey roller coaster that morphs seamlessly from treasure hunt to conspiracy thriller to escape room.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984819-65-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.
A disturbing household secret has far-reaching consequences in this dark, unusual ghost story.
Mallory Quinn, fresh out of rehab and recovering from a recent tragedy, has taken a job as a nanny for an affluent couple living in the upscale suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey, when a series of strange events start to make her (and her employers) question her own sanity. Teddy, the precocious and shy 5-year-old boy she's charged with watching, seems to be haunted by a ghost who channels his body to draw pictures that are far too complex and well formed for such a young child. At first, these drawings are rather typical: rabbits, hot air balloons, trees. But then the illustrations take a dark turn, showcasing the details of a gruesome murder; the inclusion of the drawings, which start out as stick figures and grow increasingly more disturbing and sophisticated, brings the reader right into the story. With the help of an attractive young gardener and a psychic neighbor and using only the drawings as clues, Mallory must solve the mystery of the house's grizzly past before it's too late. Rekulak does a great job with character development: Mallory, who narrates in the first person, has an engaging voice; the Maxwells' slightly overbearing parenting style and passive-aggressive quips feel very familiar; and Teddy is so three-dimensional that he sometimes feels like a real child.
It's almost enough to make a person believe in ghosts.Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-81934-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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