The Scare Salon

While I did have a couple of minor issues with the way the tale was structured, the large cast of characters not being quite as distinct from one another as I would have liked, and also with there not being many surprises behind who the “seven rabbits” of the title were, overall this was a gory, entertaining revenge story that should appeal to fans of over-the-top torture and extreme vengeance.

Seven Rabbits is set in a sort of backward, redneck town near Tampa called Tall Oak (which as far as I know is fictional, but I’ve lived in the Sunshine State most of my life and know exactly the kind of place he’s talking about). The town is dying a slow death, and seemingly the only big deal among the residents is the high school football team.

Said members of this team are your typical asshole jock types, and their assholery is helpfully bolstered by the fact that nearly all of the kids’ dads are rich and/or work in law enforcement or politics in some capacity, so of course whenever these miscreants get up to no good (and they do, in spades), no one does fuck all about it.

At the beginning of the story, we’re introduced to Chase Rogers, a fifteen-year-old sophomore who has just moved to Tall Oak from Tampa. He’s considered one of the best tight ends in the state (and I don’t give a shit about football so that term gives me a chuckle because it sounds dirty; yes, I’m immature, deal with it), so he got an easy in on the football team in his dinky new town.

The other guys on the team are all older, and Chase is nervous because he thinks he won’t fit in, but his new teammates seem welcoming, even inviting him along on their annual trip to this remote cabin, where they spend a weekend drinking and generally being obnoxious douches in the name of “team building.”

We’re quickly introduced to the rest of the guys on the team. There’s Trevor McKee, better known as “Ford” because he’s as big as a truck; his dad is the team’s coach. Then there’s Justin Jackson, the team captain and the son of the mayor; Cole Connors, better known as “Irish” for obvious reasons; Nick and Lemichael Sanders, the twin sons of the police chief; and a seemingly Mexican kid named Hector whose last name isn’t mentioned and who arrives with the Sanders’ but doesn’t seem related to them. To a man, they are all your stereotypical jock buttplugs and I wanted to punch each and every one of them within the first few pages (other than Chase, who was mostly sympathetic). For this reason, there isn’t much to differentiate one dude from another, so I admit as I was reading I kept losing track of which jock was which.

So the coterie of fuckknuckles starts the drive up to the cabin in chapter one, but then at the beginning of chapter two, we switch gears a bit and follow a girl named Tiffany and her dad, who are sitting in the Tall Oak police station. It becomes clear very quickly that Tiffany has been sexually assaulted, and she’s accusing one of the jocks—specifically Ford—of being the perpetrator. But because she did go out on a date with him and started making out with him willingly, the cops completely blow her off, accusing her of having consensual sex with him and then regretting it later. This is a pretty typical thing for the police to do in that sort of situation, sadly, and in the context of the story, it’s even more infuriating, because the kids on the football team are seen around town as golden boys who can do absolutely no wrong, even though they all suck as human beings.

We then meet back up with the jocks, who have arrived at the cabin for their weekend of debauchery, and are proceeding to race each other to see who can die of alcohol poisoning the fastest. Chase, who is younger and not used to drinking gallons of vodka in a single sitting, is having a hard time, and ends up barfing in the sink. The other guys razz him for it, but then make him drink even more; this is sort of an initiation rite into the team, of course, and all the other guys went through it too.

Once everyone is good and loaded, Justin produces a laptop, on which he shows the team’s “year in review.” It will shock precisely no one to learn that this review has nothing to do with their past football games and everything to do with how many chicks they banged over the preceding months. Unsettlingly, at least from Chase’s point of view, some of the photos Justin shows in the PowerPoint are of girls who are obviously unconscious or being forced to do things against their will. Not all of them, but enough to make Chase extremely uncomfortable. He does sort of try to minimize it, though, because he really wants to belong with these shitheads and be “cool.”

Significantly less cool is the video that Justin shows at the end, which depicts Chase losing his virginity to his beloved girlfriend, Megan. That sex was all sweet and consensual and stuff, but Chase and Megan happened to do the deed at a party at Justin’s house, and unbeknownst to them, Justin recorded the whole encounter. Chase is understandably livid that this intimate moment between him and his girl (who he genuinely loves) has been cheapened in this way, but the guys all tell him to chill out about it; it’s just a rite of passage, they tell him, and they all went through the same thing when they joined the team. Chase is still pissed, but mollified somewhat.

Later, they all fall into a drunken stupor, and at one point Nick gets up to use the bathroom. As he’s doing so, he happens to glance out the window and sees a man in a jumpsuit, wearing a plastic rabbit mask, emerge from the tree line and stare at him. Freaked out, he wakes up the others, who initially don’t believe him until they all look outside and see even more of these bunny-masked men creeping out of the woods. Even more ominously, they’re all carrying machetes.

From this stage, the book alternates between the siege narrative developing at the cabin, whereby the eventual seven bunnymen toy with and fuck up the jocks in various ways, and interstitial scenes featuring some of the girls from the pictures Justin was showing earlier, detailing the appalling shit that one or more of the jocks did to them. So trigger warning for sexual assault, because there’s a lot of it described here.

Because the book is structured this way, with the girls’ narratives sandwiched in between the chapters of “main” action at the cabin, it isn’t too hard to figure out why the bunnymen are attacking the jocks, which is one of the things I wished had been done a bit differently, as it would have stretched the mystery of the bunnymens’ identity out longer. But honestly, the mystery element isn’t really a pivotal aspect of the story, so it works just fine all in all, in spite of the obviousness.

As I said, this was quite entertaining and well-paced, with no extraneous bullshit of any kind; just a very straightforward, nasty revenge story. And it DOES get nasty, so if you’re not a big fan of gore or torture-type stuff, you might want to give this one a pass. I’m not sure I was a huge fan of the ending, but it did surprise me a bit, which is always good; I just wasn’t sure if it was left that way in order to avoid making any kind of grand statement about how justified the bunnymen were in their act of vengeance.

If you’re into lean, mean, graphic, bloody revenge tales, then I can’t see why you wouldn’t have a good time with this one; it’s well-written and streamlined, and gets the job done. I had a couple of small issues with it as I detailed earlier, but in the aggregate, I enjoyed it a lot and would recommend it to torture porn and revenge story aficionados alike.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.