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A review by valentinefleisch
Bunny by Mona Awad
5.0
Dark academia meets The Master meets My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
I’ve already seen this book compared to Heathers, but I would also recommend it for fans of films like Cabin in the Woods—self-aware horror with a darkly humorous and scathing commentary not only of its tropes but of its very medium. I realize I am biased in loving this book since it’s very much a book for book lovers, making a playful mockery of the way stories are synthesized and discussed. It does my favorite thing, which is put the creative process on display—in fact, it puts it on blast. Here the act of creation is infused with horror rather in the way that Frankenstein makes a horror of the act of creation (maybe part of why I enjoyed this book so much??)
Bunny follows Samantha, an MFA student at a prestigious institution who resents the rich girls in her program, a teeth achingly-sweet group of four who are constantly calling each other ‘Bunny.’ They’ve always made Samantha feel alienated from the program, but she begins to reconsider her dislike when she receives an invitation to one of their private parties and begins to learn more about their strange creative process.
This book is hard to talk about without giving key elements away, so maybe it would be helpful to take a second and try to pin down what exactly this book is:
-Absurd: Every review I’ve seen contains some variation of, “lol what the fuck?”
-Horror: There’s a motif of an axe throughout. A body part or two might or might not explode. Moreover, there’s a reference to H.P. Lovecraft on the second page, which begins our ride into a world whose normality, even whose attractiveness, belies its gross underbelly.
-Fantasy: Witchery! Fairy tale motifs! A constant undercurrent of sinister magic!
-Thriller: There are cult elements and people who absolutely should not be trusted with that ax. Our main character never seems to be in a safe or secure position, whether its because of her precarious financial situation or her proximity to questionable as hell people. There are moments where you question her sanity, where you question what’s real, but it never makes recourse to the lazy thriller route of the woman who was crazy all along and just making everything up in some waking dream sequence.
-Dark comedy: There’s an absolutely brilliant scene in here where members of the MFA program critique each other in the bloated yet empty language of their writing workshop. It’s not LOL comedy, but you do smile even while you are supremely uncomfortable.
-Coming of age: These women are all graduate students, yet on one side of this narrative you have a group with a clique mentality and the mannerisms of little girls: constantly hugging, giggling, cooing, eating foods only in miniature, and being otherwise addicted to cuteness. On the other side, you have the Samantha, whose attitude seems reminiscent of an angsty teen who’s not like other girls and has probably made a joke or two about blowing up her school. In fact, is this girl even likable? Am I meant to like her? I’m not sure. I certainly DIDN’T like her a great deal of the time, and at other points I sympathized with her. Either way, I was consistently interested in her story. She was toxic and the people around her were toxic, and the fact that there is no safe space to be found heightened the tension.
There’s some absolutely stunning imagery in here. I think it would work really well as a highly stylized horror series and would allow a director to play a lot with the bright, pastel colors of the Bunnies’ world and the dark, grittier images of Samantha’s world. Their sharp distinction points to divisions in class and gender expression, which begins with the simplistic pretty pink vs. punk black and then gets...complicated. And weird. And very magical.
I loved how this book was a narrative about narrative. It played with it, made fun of it. Not simply the way that academic renderings of work can be buzzworded to death (though it did that A LOT and HILARIOUSLY), but it also takes a critical look at trauma porn and the entitlement that’s inherent in it. How people have to access pain and make it available to others in order to seem worthwhile as a creative. It critiques how prescribed processes and values for producing work (in this instance an academic space) can become an echo chamber that paradoxically limits creativity, and how getting caught in that echo chamber makes it hard to resist becoming subsumed by the hivemind—a danger that’s realized here with greater consequences than simply producing generic work.
Speaking of hiveminds, this book uses interesting narratorial techniques, including some instances of collective first person, which is a method I’ve been loving lately. Hivemind narration is something I loved in Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks, and here it takes on a sinister twist. I’m in awe of Mona Awad’s strength as a storyteller: to utilize narrative techniques, to subvert them, to deconstruct them, then to laugh at them. The artistry here is impressive. I’ll be reading everything else this author has to offer.
I’ve already seen this book compared to Heathers, but I would also recommend it for fans of films like Cabin in the Woods—self-aware horror with a darkly humorous and scathing commentary not only of its tropes but of its very medium. I realize I am biased in loving this book since it’s very much a book for book lovers, making a playful mockery of the way stories are synthesized and discussed. It does my favorite thing, which is put the creative process on display—in fact, it puts it on blast. Here the act of creation is infused with horror rather in the way that Frankenstein makes a horror of the act of creation (maybe part of why I enjoyed this book so much??)
Bunny follows Samantha, an MFA student at a prestigious institution who resents the rich girls in her program, a teeth achingly-sweet group of four who are constantly calling each other ‘Bunny.’ They’ve always made Samantha feel alienated from the program, but she begins to reconsider her dislike when she receives an invitation to one of their private parties and begins to learn more about their strange creative process.
This book is hard to talk about without giving key elements away, so maybe it would be helpful to take a second and try to pin down what exactly this book is:
-Absurd: Every review I’ve seen contains some variation of, “lol what the fuck?”
-Horror: There’s a motif of an axe throughout. A body part or two might or might not explode. Moreover, there’s a reference to H.P. Lovecraft on the second page, which begins our ride into a world whose normality, even whose attractiveness, belies its gross underbelly.
-Fantasy: Witchery! Fairy tale motifs! A constant undercurrent of sinister magic!
-Thriller: There are cult elements and people who absolutely should not be trusted with that ax. Our main character never seems to be in a safe or secure position, whether its because of her precarious financial situation or her proximity to questionable as hell people. There are moments where you question her sanity, where you question what’s real, but it never makes recourse to the lazy thriller route of the woman who was crazy all along and just making everything up in some waking dream sequence.
-Dark comedy: There’s an absolutely brilliant scene in here where members of the MFA program critique each other in the bloated yet empty language of their writing workshop. It’s not LOL comedy, but you do smile even while you are supremely uncomfortable.
-Coming of age: These women are all graduate students, yet on one side of this narrative you have a group with a clique mentality and the mannerisms of little girls: constantly hugging, giggling, cooing, eating foods only in miniature, and being otherwise addicted to cuteness. On the other side, you have the Samantha, whose attitude seems reminiscent of an angsty teen who’s not like other girls and has probably made a joke or two about blowing up her school. In fact, is this girl even likable? Am I meant to like her? I’m not sure. I certainly DIDN’T like her a great deal of the time, and at other points I sympathized with her. Either way, I was consistently interested in her story. She was toxic and the people around her were toxic, and the fact that there is no safe space to be found heightened the tension.
There’s some absolutely stunning imagery in here. I think it would work really well as a highly stylized horror series and would allow a director to play a lot with the bright, pastel colors of the Bunnies’ world and the dark, grittier images of Samantha’s world. Their sharp distinction points to divisions in class and gender expression, which begins with the simplistic pretty pink vs. punk black and then gets...complicated. And weird. And very magical.
I loved how this book was a narrative about narrative. It played with it, made fun of it. Not simply the way that academic renderings of work can be buzzworded to death (though it did that A LOT and HILARIOUSLY), but it also takes a critical look at trauma porn and the entitlement that’s inherent in it. How people have to access pain and make it available to others in order to seem worthwhile as a creative. It critiques how prescribed processes and values for producing work (in this instance an academic space) can become an echo chamber that paradoxically limits creativity, and how getting caught in that echo chamber makes it hard to resist becoming subsumed by the hivemind—a danger that’s realized here with greater consequences than simply producing generic work.
Speaking of hiveminds, this book uses interesting narratorial techniques, including some instances of collective first person, which is a method I’ve been loving lately. Hivemind narration is something I loved in Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks, and here it takes on a sinister twist. I’m in awe of Mona Awad’s strength as a storyteller: to utilize narrative techniques, to subvert them, to deconstruct them, then to laugh at them. The artistry here is impressive. I’ll be reading everything else this author has to offer.