Bunny

                                       

Title: Bunny

Author: Mona Awad

Published: Penguin Books, June 11, 2019

Pages: 317

Genre: Dark Humor

"We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?"

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. 

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

What did I just read? I have no idea. Did I have a good time? Kind of.. 

Bunny, I don't even know what happened. I don't know what was real and what was the narrator being absolutely unhinged. Were the bunny boys real? Were the bunnies real, or just bunnies? Did this woman have four pet rabbits that she conjured up a rivalry with....POSSIBLY! 

It was excellent though. Very spooky. There was a lot of body horror and gore which worked really well and didn't detract from the story. This felt very much like a woman who has been bullied and left out of the "cool clique" for her whole life telling us what was happening on the "inside" of the club and not having a clue of what they were actually getting up to. It's like all of the rumors that you hear about weird rituals and stuff happening when you get inducted into sororities or secret societies. This whole book felt like someone's really messed up guess at what those are like.

All of the allusions and references to Lovecraft were very fun. It actually made me want to read some Lovecraft because it made me wonder which nods I was missing because I've only consumed fiction inspired by Lovecraft, but never his original work. Since this was a book club pick maybe I can convince them to read Lovecraft next month.

Ratings

Stars: 4/5