Rabbits: A Novel

Terry Miles

Jun 2021 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Christine Lakin

About this audiobook

A deadly underground game might just be altering reality itself in this all-new adventure set in the world of the hit Rabbits podcast.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL • “A wild ride . . . impossible to put down.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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 p.m. You check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize the date is April 4—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 the entire world as its canvas.

Since the game started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. The identities of these winners are unknown.

So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to the secrets of the universe itself.

But the deeper you get, the more dangerous 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, rumored to be the 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: Eleven begins.

And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.

Ratings and reviews

This was suggested as a similar read to Blake Crouch's Dark Matter. I don't think this is worthy of that comparison. I was excited by the concept of this book during the first few chapters, but it ultimately fell flat. The author tried to include subculture references to hacking/cryptography but didn't delve into them enough to show the complexity. Not sure if that's because they didn't want to lose the casual reader in technical jargon or if they just didn't do enough research. Either way, the "game" seems to be more about finding clues than it is about intellectual prowess. That was disappointing to me.