I have a Video Review on my Youtube Channel: Red Rabbit Review

I thought Red Rabbit was fine, it's a decent book but it's not blow your mind good nor is it absolutely horrendous. I will say for me in particular a lot of that is due to the fact that I strongly believe this book was mismarketed, its marketed as a western folk horror and I think it actually would have done better had it been marketed as a supernatural folk fantasy tale. This is mostly due to the fact that the horror elements were pretty much nonexistent throughout the story.

I really wanted that horror element but all of the parts that were supposed to be horror fell extremely flat. This was the factor that was the most disappointing for me, as I have been really starting to explore horror a little bit more on my own terms and one idea I'm really interested in is Western Horror. I've played a few games such as Evil West and Weird West and love the idea and the execution of them so I was hoping I could find that same theme in a book. So the fact that I got more supernatural then horror was a major let down. Had the book been marketed as a supernatural romp I know my expectations would have been different.

Now this doesn't mean there aren't any horror elements that issue lies in the execution in the styling of how the horror parts were done. Most of the scenes involved them walking into an area where the "horror" situation pretty much already happened and the characters stand around discussing it and they're like "wow this is such a frightening thing. oh no! we should get out of here, this is a real damper of a place!" and you're just kind of like "okay" and that's how pretty much all of the scenes that dealt with something horrific were handled. This created the exact opposite of being scared or frightened, the scenes would have hit a lot harder if you actually got to see the characters living through it, that would have been scary.

When we do finally get a chance to see one scene of something horrific happen it's very short-lived, it's a couple pages long and it didn't really reach that level where you were hit with “oh God this is so scary” and the evil entity that was involved was basically leatherface… And I was not able to enjoy the scene because it really felt like the author said “I like the idea of leatherface and I'm going to put it in my book but dial it down to a 2” I'll be very frank you all right now Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the few horror movies that I actually cannot watch because of all the blood and gore (I do not do well with blood) but I've also always found the idea of leatherface to honestly be kind of frightening because it could be based in reality, so the fact that when this character was introduced and I immediately went “ohhhhhh leatherface” and then when it played out I immediately thought “leatherface dialed down” it kind of ruined the experience.

The characters are all forgettable, unfortunately there is a big cast so don't listen to the synopsis because the synopsis makes you think the story is about a particular character, it is in fact not. It's about this little motley crew that gets cobbled together as the story progresses but none of them leave a lasting impression, and honestly the character in the synopsis kind of fades to the background and this really irritated me. This also suffered heavily from “insert random character chapter” that got really irritating because they were a one-time chapter and just became more of a nuisance to me.

The witch aspect of this I think was also poorly handled, she's barely in the book and I think the approach of what the author was attempting to do with it being more of a “everyone kind of misunderstands this person, so they're scared of her thusly making them hate her” could have been an interesting angle but with her presence barley being in the book it really made it difficult for me to care, it felt like he didn’t know how to handle it fully.

There is another plot line that involved a demon that honestly felt like it was added last minute. By the time you get to the end of that plot line it feels very disconnected from everything else and there really isn’t any information on this character, they kind of pop up out of the blue and then become this nuisance throughout the story. There is some action mostly towards the end and honestly, I didn’t think the final battle scene was all that interesting. And it was soured even more by the poorly and very blatant death that the author shoehorned into the story because he didn’t have enough actual horror in this. It was very “shock factor” style but because he made it so obvious it wasn’t exactly scary.

I also really didn't enjoy the actual ending in my opinion it's a little weird because it's very “look at us wrapping everything up all nice and pretty with a little bow right on top yay” that's how it feels and it feels so out of place in horror because I'm use to horror having those ending that are more “everything is over but there's still an air of uncertainty” feeling. It was sweet I'm not going to knock that but it's another reason why I think this should not have been billed as horror, because I would have actually loved the ending if I hadn't been told this was a horror story.

I think Red Rabbit is still worth checking out, it's very well written, I didn't have any issues stumbling over any of the dialogue Grecian was able to execute a western accent really well. The first half of the story is more interesting than the last half, but I think if you go into this thinking you're going to get this Western Supernatural Folk Tale you'll enjoy it a bit more.