Killing The Rabbit-Alison Goodman

Killing The Rabbit
Alison Goodman
Bantam, Aug 2007, $6.99
ISBN: 9780553590111

Hannie Reynard is embarrassed and a bit frightened as she wasted her Independent Filmmakers Fund grant on a weekend in Paris. Now, the acting finance director Mosson J. Ferret is auditing her books. She remembers him from film school before he dropped out. However, Hannie is unaware that Mosson is bored and wants to get behind the camera; he plans to “blackmail” her into letting him film her documentary, Freaks or Frauds on women containing a gene mutation that enables them to naturally kill their fetus by reabsorbing it; she would direct.

At the same time, the Forecaster drew up a two hundred year strategic plan for his Company Osaga-Fowler Pharmaceutical, but knows that the firm could be in trouble due to the “RabbitWoman Mutation” that enables some human females to self absorb a fetus; thus if this internal abortion mutation spreads as the Forecaster expects based on Darwinism, the Company’s best selling contraceptive line would sink and consequently so will the firm though generations into the future. His job .is to insure all females who contain the mutation die. Soon the filmmakers and the Company’s subcontracted help will meet as the Freaks are being eliminated.

This is a dark tale that extrapolates Japanese long term planning and a woman’s reproductive rights to extremes that will leave the audience wondering how business firms and right to life groups would behave if a long term natural challenge to their respective positions occur. In this case, murder is the obvious weapon of the Company, but the right to life groups’ reaction was never explored. Thus the audience obtains a tense thriller based on a fascinating premise that focuses too much on the hits rather than on how society reacts to the RabbitWoman mutation. This tale is entertaining and exciting; on the other hand KILLING THE RABBIT is of those that could have been a classic thought provoker.

Harriet Klausner