The Rabbit Back Literature Society
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 125006192X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Only nine people have ever been chosen by renowned children's author Laura White to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a tenth member has been selected: a young literature teacher named Ella.
Soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual known as "The Game"? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura White's winter party? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves? Was there once another tenth member, before her? Slowly, as Ella explores the Society and its history, disturbing secrets that had been buried for years start to come to light. . . .
In Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen's chilling, darkly funny novel, The Rabbit Back Literature Society, praised as "Twin Peaks meets the Brothers Grimm" (The Telegraph), the uncanny brushes up against the everyday in the most beguiling and unexpected of ways.
the tenth member isn’t going to be trained after all. That’s it in a nutshell.” “You got farther than your dad did, in any case,” Ingrid said. Ella was already getting out of the car. She stopped, lowered her bum back onto the seat, and looked at Ingrid. “What did you say about my dad?” Katz froze. Her right eye darted nervously as the light hit it. “I thought you knew,” she said. “Knew what?” “That Paavo Emil, your father, knew Laura White many years ago. And us—the members of the
that he had left me standing alone at a rat’s grave. So I walked after him. The way to Laura’s house seemed terribly long. When I got there, I walked around in the garden for a while trying to decide whether to go inside at all. I went to the edge of the pond and was about to rinse my face with the cool water, but then I was startled by a branch or a reflection and I ran to the porch. The pond in Laura’s garden made all of us nervous—it was fun to skate on in the winter, but during the summer we
but they had come out right after her beautiful thoughts, and the moment they had crystallized into words she had started to upbraid herself for them. She had managed to conceal her callousness from herself, but when she played The Game she vomited it all out. She’d heard herself say that her father’s death and funeral had meant no more to her than when an appliance that has been malfunctioning for a long time finally breaks down completely—mostly a relief rather than a loss. She’d listened like
Society, but he was never one of us. We didn’t want to know his name. We didn’t want to know anything about him.” Ella looked surprised. “Think about it,” Winter said. “A child on his way to becoming a writer, like us, and yet so far above us that we couldn’t even imitate him. How could we possibly have liked him?” “I assume you weren’t overwhelmed with grief when he died, then?” “Grief is the wrong word,” Winter said with a vague look in his eyes. “We were shocked, of course. But we didn’t
mitigated by leaving milk and bread under the large stone behind the currant bushes in the evening and absolutely avoiding the garden after the sun has set. Ella remembers the other mythological mapping—the one the mapper wrote for Martti Winter, warning him not to show it to anyone. She looks at him and guesses that he’s thinking about the same thing. Ella thinks about the ground under her feet. The names and order of the layers of earth that she learned in school pass through her mind. She