I know what you’re thinking. “A book about fucking bunnies? Not just a book, but a novel? 476 goddamn pages? No fucking way can that be anything but torture. That’s, like, what Luna Lovegood reads on the shitter.” Okay, but no. Here’s the thing. This book is actually fucking amazing. Seriously, this is some next-level shit. Hear me out.

First of all, this dude Richard Adams knew his shit. He didn’t just pull some stories out of his ass and figure that would be good enough: before he wrote about rabbits, he studied those little fuckers. He didn’t just read the best reference book about them, he, like, called its author up and made him into a best bro. They’d, like, go walking over the downs talking about bunnies and shit for hours and hours and hours.

Point is, when these bunnies start doing some un-bunny-like shit, dude knows it and just puts it out there. He’s like, yo, these special bunnies I’m telling you about who, like, made special plans and fucked with humans and made friends with birds? Yeah, that ain’t natural. It happened to these bunnies, because they were in some exceptional circumstances, and that’s why they got a fat novel written about them.

So you’re like, “Okay, cool, consider my disbelief 100% suspended. You know your shit and I don’t, so I’m gonna just take it from you when it comes to saying what the hell rabbits do and what they don’t do. You tell me bunnies fuck in the winter and chill in the summer? Alright, I’m down. But these bunnies were fucking in the summer? Goddamn, that is some perverse shit going on right there. Tell me more!” See, this book works like that.

See, the reason this book works is that this guy gets in in the heads of those little British bunnies. Rabbits look cute and shit when you’re in a zoo, but this guy gets you to think about just how fucking bleak it is to be a bunny. First thing, you just live, like, what? Three, four years? No wonder you want to fuck all the time—but you only can in the winter! Ouch.

Then, you always have to be afraid of, like, basically everything. You can maybe dominate, like, a mouse—but that’s it. It’s not just the foxes and the humans you have to be afraid of, it’s shit like weasels and stoats. You know what a stoat is? Well, you would if you were a rabbit, because those nasty little fuckers can take you straight down—even if you’re ten times their size! I shit you not—you can see it on YouTube.

Okay, so you’re starting to get the idea about why this book is actually baller. It’s this hard-ass story about these desperate little mofos who need to vacate their warren because a bunch of humans are about to come fuck it up with poison gas or something. That is some real shit right there.

So these rabbits go on this epic journey across England to find a new place to just live their fucking lives without being gassed or stoated, and on the way they run into other warrens that are just into some twisted shit. Some of them are all fascist and shit—like, they can only use certain holes at certain times, otherwise they get their ears chewed off by the rabbit police or whatever—and some of them are seemingly peaceful, because they’re in a larger fucked-up situation.

I don’t want to spoil this for you or whatever, but I’m just gonna say that it’s an indication of how good this fucker is at telling this goddamn rabbit story that when you get to that part and these other rabbits are all advanced with, like, cave paintings and shit, you’re like, “Daaaaaaaamn! What the fuck is up with that?! That is some fucked-up shit that rabbits would never do, and something is really wrong with these little bunny bastards, so these other rabbits had better get the fuck out of there and listen to the little clairvoyant fucker they brought along with them.” (I told you, this book gets you to totally suspend your disbelief.)

Dude even makes up, like, this whole other language for these rabbits, and that sounds dumb as shit, I know, but it totally works. Read a few hundred pages of this, and when your roommate comes home and asks you how many brews are left in the fridge, you’re like, “Yo, get off my back, bro! There are, like, hrair Bud Lights in there. You want more, get in your goddamn hrududu and buy some. Jesus, it’s not even ni-frith, you fucking alcoholic.”

Seriously, start reading this shit and you won’t be able to put it down. It’s totally suspenseful, because you genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen to these little fuckers. You know this guy is down on some National Geographic shit, and you know he’s not going to blink at having some random elil take your favorite little rabbit out because that shit happens out there on the down. This is real, and life is fucking cold for a bunny rabbit.

Four words, then I’m through: Read this goddamn book. It’s so fucking good, when you finish, the next time you see a rabbit in a cage you’re going to give that fat fucker a fist-bump and be all, “Yo. I got you.”

– Jay Gabler