Rabbit Hunt is quite the wild ride. This horror novella by Wrath James White starts of with quite the list of trigger warnings, which on its own starting to read them made me wonder if I really wanted to read this book. Wrath is known for his hardcore horror writing with extreme – sometimes to the points of excessive – violence, gore, and sexual content. Having never read erotica, romance, or extreme horror I went into this with bated breath.
Rabbit Hunt follows a group of 4 friends, all black men getting together for a summer hunting trip for the first time in a while. This isn’t any ordinary hunting trip, they’re hunting snow bunnies, which is their own code for meeting up with white women to have sex with then kill. To them these killings are justified, a recompense for a long history of a predominately white society killing and holding back the progress of black people both overtly and covertly. Even if any of these women aren’t contributing directly to our main characters’ problems they aren’t doing anything to try and make things better either which they view as being just as bad. Our main characters also run into a group of individuals with at least one overtly racist bigoted individual and decide they want to hunt that group down as well after they have finished with their planned snow bunny hunt.
It becomes very clear very early that these hunts aren’t about making the world a better place despite that being the lie they tell themselves and each other, its more just about the main characters fulfilling themselves to the full extent of their wants and desires, feeding their penchants for rape, brutalization, and murder.
The level of excess within this book is not really my cup of tea, it was certainly mostly well written with only a few errors here and there, the odd spelling issue, a word forgotten here and there, the only big thing was listing the name of a character that had just died, among the list of characters taking advantage of the poor weather to enact revenge on those who killed that character. The errors were noticeable enough I feel the editor should have caught them with relative ease.
The inclusion of the brief prologue revealing consequences to our main characters’ actions was fantastic. While well written the sexual focus and torture aspects really were not my cup of tea and at the end of the day land me down at a 6 of 10 stars. If you like that sort of thing, Wrath’s works in general or other hardcore horror with a decent amount of erotic elements than it’s certainly worth the read and I’m sure you’d enjoy it more than I did.
Cthulhuville 