Christopher Yates, America’s finest writer of thrillers, newest novel, The Rabbit Club, weaves a tale that is nearly impossible to put down. It includes Oxford University, secret societies, danger and suspense at every turn, and a sense of anticipation much needed in a world filled with instant gratification.
Yates said penning novels with intricate story details and twists and turns that unravel unexpectedly is sometimes a challenge, given today’s way of appreciating storytelling.
“Storytelling is changing because of social media and streaming. Novels are by their nature very slow, so the struggle is to try and grab someone’s attention when maybe they’re used to all of this new media, which moves fast, fast, fast,” he said.
Yates does a master class of overcoming that struggle in The Rabbit Club because the result is a really great story that leaves you wanting more. It grabs your attention immediately, sublimely and seemingly effortlessly, until you are swept into a great story of dark academia at Oxford, centering on a world that was supposed to be filled with intellectuals and promise. But it becomes quite the opposite.
Yates, who was born and raised in Kent, studied at the same university where he set the storyline. He says the main character isn’t him, but after interviewing Yates, it is clear there are parts of him included in the character.
“The interesting thing is, the main character on the surface is nothing like me. He’s called Ali, a Californian. So he obviously didn’t grow up in Britain and has a famous rock star dad. My dad worked for the post office,” he says. “The novel is really about Ali coming to Britain to discover what Britain’s like and what Oxford is like. And my experience was to discover what Oxford was like, because I was the first person from my family to go to college. My extended family, no one at all, had gone to college.”
At a young age, Yates decided he wanted to be a writer. His desire began with a desire to pen prose.
“It was a burning ambition as a 16-year-old schoolyard poet. Although obviously I kept my poems secret, so it was not to get beaten up,” he says laughing.
Yates said he knew early on in life he wanted to be a novelist.
“I waited till I was 30 because I wanted some life experience, and honestly, to be in workplaces and earn some money before doing this incredibly crazy, risky thing of throwing in my job and just concentrating on writing novels,” he said.
The first couple he wrote weren’t very good, he admits.
“I kind of think of those as my MBAs in creative writing. I didn’t take a course, I just broke a couple of bad novels first and then hit upon this idea from my own days at Oxford of this crazy game of psychological dares that me and my friend would talk about in the bar, and we never dared play it,” he said.
His first published novel, “Black Chalk,” is the result of imagining what would have happened if they had played that crazy Game. The Rabbit Club happens four years later.
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“It’s a different college from where I set the first one, although they’re both parts of Oxford University. It’s got this strange college system, and it overlaps a bit, but it’s not a sequel, so people don’t have to have read Black Chalk. I’d love it if people read them almost in the wrong order and had a different experience,” he explained.
The twists and turns Yates takes the reader on make this novel a must-read to ring in the summer. It is hard to put down, and he is so descriptive of the characters and the scenery that it is easy for the reader to fully immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, and buildup that The Rabbit Club delivers.