That’s Not All, Folks

Most people look for home in a place or a person. For Samantha Heather Mackey — the brilliant but depressed twenty-five-year-old who narrates Mona Awad’s Bunny — home is her imagination. Her mother is dead, and her father is a con artist who has been in hiding for years. To cope, she comes up with “horrific and fantastic” stories. Her lively inner world has earned her a scholarship to attend a graduate writing program at Warren University, a fictional Ivy League school in New England.

She quickly becomes the object of envy and ridicule in her prestigious cohort, which is a pack of wealthy, pastel-clad girls who call each other “Bunny” and move through campus like a single organism. The four of them — Sam calls them Kira, Caroline, Victoria, and Eleanor in this volume — coo over vintage typewriters, braid each other’s hair, and speak in unison. They frequent a café that serves everything in miniature: “Mini sodas. Mini burgers. Mini poutines. Mini cupcakes.” They embrace in “communal, eyes-shut-tight, boa-constricting” hugs. Soon it’s revealed that the Bunnies aren’t just a clique. They’re a coven.

Their own gory version of Workshop takes place off campus, where they turn live rabbits into men they call Drafts, Darlings, or Hybrids. These beings are handsome but fundamentally defective; they lack hands and genitals and make awkwardly aggressive declarations of love. “I found your treelike height erotic and I enjoyed your bleak dress sense more than I can say,” one of them tells Sam. When the Bunnies tire of these creatures, they execute them with the swing of an axe. The joke, of course, is that this is what writers do all the time: transform raw matter into pliable, sometimes unbelievable characters, and then, if the work falls short, deconstruct them.

The real target of Awad’s satire is creative writing programs and the institutions they are a part of. The Bunnies are turning rabbits into men in order to create experimental art that “subverts the whole concept of genre.” One member of the clique, who is particularly smug, explains how their fiction “basically fucks the writing medium, Samantha. Which is dead anyway, you know?”

The latest academic fixation of the young writers is the Body. “At Warren, the Body is all the rage,” Sam observes. Her peers speak as if they’ve just discovered that they inhabit dying flesh, immediately elevating it into rich material. For Workshop at school, Caroline produces a story about “a girl who is having a vague love affair with a mist that only she can see,” while Victoria submits “a series of unpunctuated vignettes about a woman named Z who pukes up soup while thinking nihilistic thoughts, then has anal sex in a trailer.” The girls talk in hyperbolic theory-laden jargon. They worship the Process, intertextuality, and, of course, hybrid prose, which, as Sam puts it, is “what you call something when you just don’t know what you’re doing anymore.”

All of this unfolds while the nameless town surrounding Warren is plagued by murders, sexual assaults, and decapitations. Awad’s critique of isolated elitism is sharp. The university operates a car service for those who “don’t feel safe walking home from campus,” even in the middle of the day. Students look away from homeless people and disregard the fraught community around them. Sam describes arriving at school: “Everyone on the street suddenly goes from looking like an extra in a zombie movie to the star of a French New Wave film.” Inside this bubble, her peers don camel-hair coats, “purses of the softest leather,” and cashmere scarves. They remain blissfully insulated from the gritty reality they try so hard to capture in their stories.

Ultimately, are the Bunnies really turning rabbits into men? Awad never answers definitively. She’s far more interested in the uneasy overlap between imagination and reality — familiar territory for every author. “All fiction writers, because we project and we use our imaginations, we’re always worried about that,” she has told Vanity Fair. “ ‘Is this really happening or am I imagining it?’ That’s the seed of all horror.” At Warren, that seed finds fertile ground. As the violence surrounding Sam intensifies, her grip on reality weakens. She recounts the moment that one Darling explodes. It unleashes “the hail of bone, the shower of blood, the terrible brain rain.” Another time, the Bunnies botch a decapitation, and the Draft bolts from the bathroom with “an ax stuck deep in its furry shoulder.” It screams until one of them finally chops its head off.

At its core, Bunny is about the brutal necessity of killing one’s darlings — whether those darlings are words on paper, phases of life, or past traumas. In the end, after the blood galore, Sam manages to lay her burdens to rest and let go of the nightmarish fantasies that once felt like home, at least for a little while.

We Love You, Bunny opens years later, on Halloween, with Sam bound and gagged in an attic during her book tour. She’s been kidnapped by the Bunnies, who are furious about the way she has portrayed them. They’ve just read Bunny — which makes a metafictional appearance as Sam’s thesis turned novel — and they want to set the record straight, including on the names they now claim are their real ones. “You’ve been busy since we last saw you, haven’t you?” one of them says in the prologue. What follows is a polyphonic confession, each Bunny taking a turn at the axe they pass around like a talking stick.

In the first book, their hive mind is the point. In We Love You, Bunny, that collective voice fractures spectacularly. We see the jealousies, shifting alliances, and private doubts that each young woman experienced during school. In one passage, they describe plotting to report their seminar professor, Allan, for assault after he critiqued their work. Kyra resented the closeness that bloomed between Coraline and Viktoria. Coraline, in turn, found Kyra clingy, while Viktoria felt spiritually connected to Elsinore. Evidently their memories of the first rabbit they turned into a man diverge wildly: each girl is certain she was the one who played the central role in the magic.

The Bunnies were sufficiently insufferable in the first novel, but, filtered through Sam’s psyche, they flickered in and out of the story. Here Awad lets them speak at length, and her prose practically hisses with malice. They come off as caricatures of spoiled brats, their shallowness integral to the narrative’s unsettling fun. One of the most amusing sequences across both books is the story of their failed attempts to chase down wild hares. “They no longer came to us so willingly,” one of them admits. “Eventually we had no choice, Bunny. No choice but to make our way to the mall, to fucking PetSmart.”

Each sentence drips acid until we get to a surprise fifth narrator: Aerius, their First Draft. Aerius is not one of the handless misfits we saw in Bunny but a sentient human. He speaks in a kind of Brontë-meets-Gen‑Z vernacular: “tis,” “twas,” “afeared,” and capitalized nouns mixed with emoji. His chapters bring the first true notes of levity and wonder into the Bunnyverse.

Aerius learned to speak by devouring the classic literature and pop culture the Bunnies force-fed him while he was locked in Kyra’s attic. For the first months of his life, he endured their favourite films, music, even their own manuscripts as they attempted to “revise” him. He eventually absorbed their violent nature, too. He chewed up their pages, mocked their writing efforts, and screamed so loudly that it was a miracle no neighbour intervened. On Halloween, he stole their axe and escaped into the night, unleashing a frenzy of bloodshed and unexpectedly falling in love.

He stumbled through the town like a newborn creature, discovering “Goldy Liquid” (Goldschläger) and trying to learn to dance. His descriptions of his wanderings are by turns tender and grotesque. Like Sam’s before him, Aerius’s memories reveal a desperation to belong: “ ‘Home,’ I repeated, and felt an Ache. Where was Home?” For him, home would be a return to his rabbit form. Trapped in a human body he never asked for, he lashed out.

Once again, Awad turns to the supernatural to reflect the writing process. The Bunnies spend the latter half of the novel relaying their attempts to ensnare Aerius and present him as proof of their artistic genius. But they remained novices with modest abilities. Their powerful First Draft was little more than a fluke. “Perhaps because it didn’t love you the way you wanted, to use your own crude phrasing,” the department chair told them. “So you tried, in the meager, amateur ways available to you, to fix it. And it escaped you, of course it did.”

In her sequel, Awad is far more explicit about her interest in making art. “Creation inevitably involves Destruction,” Aerius says, recalling “the Violences I had endured in the Attic.” He was later captured by various artists eager to exploit his story and his voice. Here Awad pushes the metaphor even farther: to write is to take, distort, and repurpose the suffering of others.

Read together, the two novels reveal her dazzling command of voice and form. Few writers can juggle this much tonal dexterity — satire, horror, metafiction — and land every shift in narration with such precision. Essential to the success of Awad’s art, it seems, is her ability to let go. In the end, Awad does not resolve Aerius so much as free him, an act that the Bunnies, despite their schooling, never learn to do.