Bunny – Mona Awad

Imagine a group of Popular Girls – a la Mean Girls or Heathers – who invite you to one of their parties, then promptly begin performing blood sacrifices and dark magic rituals. That’s basically the conceit of Mona Awad’s 2019 break-through novel, Bunny, so it’s not hard to see why it immediately developed a huge cult following.

Samantha Mackey is completing her MFA at a small New England liberal arts cottage, and she’s the outsider in her workshop class. The rest of the participants are Bunnies, a hyperfeminine clique of young women with wealth and pretty privilege in spades. Samantha’s only friend is Ava, a punk chain smoker who resents the university and the Bunnies and just about everything else – and that’s about all I can say without spoiling Bunny altogether.

So, consider this your warning: spoilers to follow, because it’s no fun (not to mention nearly impossible) to talk about Bunny without them.

There’s no way you’ll believe me, but I swear this is true: one of the first notes I wrote down as I was reading Bunny is “Ava gives imaginary friend vibes?”. It was just that something about the way she and Samantha interacted, and the absence of any interactions with third parties, felt so insular. Samantha is bitter, paranoid, and cynical, and it made sense that she would create an imaginary friend that indulges and encourages these tendencies. I thought that was a flight of my own fancy, reading too much into a side-plot that Awad hadn’t really intended as anything more than a contrast with the Bunnies, until things took a turn at the end of Part One and I realised I was on the right track after all.

Samantha is invited to join the Bunnies at one of their parties, and she can’t resist peeking behind the velvet curtain. Once she’s initiated into the group, they let her in on their secret: they capture the rabbits that plague the campus and, through a process of dark magic not clearly described (but clearly aided by numerous drinks spiked with hallucinogenic drugs), transform them into boys – only, they don’t call them boys, they call them “Drafts” or “Darlings”, as little nods to their literary pursuits. When the Drafts don’t work exactly as intended (none of them have functioning penises, which is a major pain point), they chop them to pieces with an axe and start again.

This leads me to another weird thought I had about mid-way through Bunny – and this might seem over the top, but bear with me. I couldn’t help but read it as a kind of prescient parable for the proliferation of AI. The monstrosity of creation, the blurring of the lines between reality and surreality, right down to the deformity of the Drafts’ hands (“hands are hard, Bunny”) – it all seemed eerily prophetic for what has unfolded over the past eighteen months.

Anyway, I would highly, highly recommend Bunny to fans of Lakewood by Megan Giddings (though I’d imagine that the Venn diagram of readers is basically already a circle) – it might also be good for readers who loved The Secret History by Donna Tartt and wanted something a little punchier and sexier to read next.

Read Bunny on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Bunny:

• “This book is garbage. Don’t waste your time and money. I would rather have read a textbook about how textbooks are written.” – Jennifer
• “I read this book and felt my frontal lobe slip into a glittery void while whispering “Bunny… Bunny…” like I’d been possessed by a cupcake.” – Get Your Tinsel In A Tangle
• “I seriously felt like I needed more of my antipsychotics while reading this.” – Andrea Davis
• “A take out menu would be more compelling and authentic” – patti whisler