It’s easy to fall into something grotesque on the internet. Two clicks down a Wikipedia chain, and you may find yourself enmeshed in death and gore. The internet lets us gawk, open-mouthed, at the disgusting, or tragic, or depraved. When screens are illuminated, they lose their mirroring quality—we don’t have to watch ourselves as we stare.
Kate Brody’s debut thriller, Rabbit Hole, closes the gap between the gawker and the watched. It begins with a man driving himself off a bridge in dreary Maine on the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of his eldest daughter, Angie. Left behind are his wife and Teddy, his surviving daughter, who centers the book.
Angie was an impulsive troublemaker in her teenage years, and her fate remains unknown. This lack of resolution haunts the remaining members of the family, as it did her father when he was alive. After his death, Teddy discovers he’d been harboring a dark hobby: deep diving on a Reddit page dedicated to Angie’s case. “I knew that it was for his sake that we never acknowledged she was dead,” Teddy explains. “At some point we all tacitly agreed to not ask and not tell. We settled on treating him like a mental patient, and he settled on treating us like apostates.”
The visitors to this page, who range from well-meaning to deranged, espouse twisted conspiracy theories behind anonymous usernames. The family’s complicated history becomes fodder for conjecture. When Teddy starts to comment and to check for updates, she falls into a spiral not unlike the one that led her father to his death.
Through Reddit, Teddy connects with 19-year-old Mickey, a self-styled investigator with issues of her own. “The blue veins around her temples seem to emerge like tributaries,” Brody writes of Mickey, “pumping squid ink through her veins. White skin, gray eyes, tattoos in muted shades of ash and navy—if you were looking at her on the television, you’d try to adjust the saturation.” Mickey, the author informs us, “is Angie, in another universe.” She and Teddy seem to build a friendship, or support system, as they try to solve the case.
Yet beneath this facade of collaboration is a web of lies and dysfunction. Teddy’s world—and therefore the book—is dark and tinged with loss. Each time she gets close to someone, she becomes paranoid that they are hiding something. The answers she seeks don’t come from the internet. By the time she sees them hurtling toward her, it’s too late for her to get out of the way.
Mortality is everywhere in the novel: in the dying dog Teddy insists on keeping with her and the lost husbands who haunt her mother, thrice a widow. Teddy is so haunted that she longs for more deaths to sever her connections to the world. “I almost look forward to feeling that sadness, because that will be the bottom. And then I’ll be untouchable,” she imagines. Angie, even while she is gone, is everywhere as more truth comes out.
Rabbit Hole may seem like a commentary on true-crime culture and social media because much of the plot originates with Reddit. But this primarily serves as a jumping-off point and occasional communication catalyst. That’s a relief, because it allows the characters to do the driving, with Teddy’s destructive personality and her relationship with Mickey coming into sharp focus. Mickey stays in Teddy’s unfurnished apartment and wears her clothes; they push each other’s boundaries and then, when it becomes too much, thrust themselves away. Teddy in particular is wary of Mickey’s fascination with her sister. It often seems that she knows too much—or is it just how much she cares?
By the last third of the book, Teddy’s self-destruction has become so visceral that it is difficult to witness. She drinks heavily and endangers herself and those around her. To be inside her head feels uncomfortable: the tragedy is tangible. It’s a testament to Brody that her story can almost repulse in its gritty detail. There are images in Rabbit Hole that will not leave my mind.
Brody does offer a sense of conclusion, complicated though it may be. But the question of whether Teddy was better off before she began her investigation remains. Loss, disappearance, mystery, crime: none of it is romantic.
Especially not when it is true.•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
