Red Rabbit Ghost is a bit of a conundrum, pulling you along on a wild, disjointed ride toward an explosive ending that sneaks into your mind, leaving you to ponder what you just read and what it all means. There are times when it feels like the story has stalled but, having read through to the end, it all makes a sort of sense. The little moments that don’t feel important are all part of the overarching story, painting a picture that’s equal parts small town life, forbidden-feeling magic, and the confusion of young adulthood when you don’t truly know where you came from. It’s a story filled with unknowns that leaves you in a dreamlike state at the end. It’s not a typical type of horror, but a creeping uneasiness that grows throughout the book as you question reality. 

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Spoilers below, travel at your own risk.

A Few Takeaways

Questionable Narrators

The book starts out pretty normal, taking you back to the protagonist’s small town he escaped from to live a college life in the big city. We see all the trappings of that town, the familiar settings, the people he’s known his whole life, how nothing and everything is going on. We also see Alice, a confusing character who feels unimportant to the overarching story until she most definitely is. It’s all a bit disorienting and moves slowly in the first half of the book. These narrators are messy to the core and it’s hard to trust anything that comes from their experiences. Between the strange made-up language, the rifts in time, and the shared experiences that bombard the plot, you never know if you can believe what you’re reading. 

Muddled Magic, Or Something Else Entirely

There are moments of definite magic, where the world becomes hazy and something else is on the horizon, but we never get to really know it. I had admittedly hoped for a Stranger Things style reveal, our main characters rushing through the break between realities to explore this hidden world, but it didn’t happen. Ultimately, that added to the mystique of the book and left many questions. Was it actual magic? Was it all a hallucination brought on by the strange swamp fungus? Was it just the crush of small town life eroding at everyone involved? We’ll never really know and that feels uncomfortable in a unique way. 

The Haunted House

I wanted more from the haunted house. It was always on the periphery of the story, popping up and drawing the main characters toward it. The walls expanded and contrasted, pulling people into them to show them the past. I expected so many cynical things lurking in this other world but it ended up being nothing more than another place, or perhaps the same place, just with muddled time. It was always interesting to picture, but it didn’t fill as much of the plot as I had hoped. 

A Type of Time Travel

I didn’t expect time travel when I went into this. It was confusing at first but in the final quarter of the book, the author really opens it up and you start to see the weaving narrative and how the past, present and future all interact with the specific moment of reckoning between Jesse and Alice. I found myself mesmerized by the narrative style and didn’t struggle jumping back and forth. So many things made sense when evaluating the rest of the book and, in a way, it made all of the confusion worth it. This isn’t your typical sci-fi  time travel where you pop out in another time and everything makes sense, leaving you to interact with the world as though you always belonged there. This is a swirl of different times, all circulating around every step you take, a fracture more than a distinct place. It’s easy to imagine it breaking people apart, as it does to a few secondary characters. Time created both mystery and horror in the plot and did so without introducing monsters or demons. That, in itself, is a triumph. Fear can be found in everyday life, and the author played well upon that fact.