What I Am Reading: "Bunny" by Mona Awad
This was a fun horror novel, a more supernatural take on the "descendants of The Secret History" genre. I place it in that genre because it concerns a small cohort of literature students, in this case at "Warren College" in an unnamed gritty New England city. From a bunch of context clues, plus a look-up of the author's biography, this is clearly intended to be Brown and Providence, respectively.
The main character is Samantha, who is the odd-woman-out in a creative writing graduate program at Warren/Brown. The other four students are "the Bunnies," a group of wealthy women who live an upper-class lifestyle, immersed in a world of pink, princesses, cupcakes, unicorns, sparkles, and other such saccharine aesthetics. In the previous semester, Samantha came to hate them and their twee groupthink, finding refuge instead with her dismissive, whimsical punk friend Ava, who lives near campus.
This changes in the new semester, when the Bunnies invite Samantha to spend time with them, and she complies out of bitter fascination. She is quickly sucked in to the circle, cooing at girly-girl things along with her new friends and forgetting Ava. Of course, books in the "descendants of The Secret History" genre are not simple John Hughs jocks-versus-nerds school stories, they are about precocious, pretentious artsy types. As such, the Bunnies don't just pontificate in their workspace class, they also "experiment" by channeling both their literary and their sexual desires into (unexplained) creation of men from rabbits. Samantha is fully brainwashed at the point when she first views these creations, called "drafts" or "hybrids" or other names and ostensibly meant to embody various over-analyzed male archetypes:
"Perhaps some sort of revisionist fairy-tale work?" Bunny suggests. "A subversive play on canonical tropes?"
Which we know is short for Bunny wanting a merman again. Or another wolf in the woods. Or some pale, sober prince emerging from the briars to climb her hair. (Ch. 15)
Samantha has been deprogrammed somewhat by Ava, and is in the process of falling out with the Bunnies, by the time they invite her to create her own hybrid; an attempt that seemingly failed until the group meets a "scary-sexy" guy at the nearby bus stop. Samantha falls back in with Ava during the winter break, but this man makes the spring semester very interesting for Samantha and Ava and for the Bunnies alike.
As can be gathered from this teaser, the book doesn't have a perfect bell-curve-shaped narrative structure, as Samantha gets through situations only to face new ones. The seeming threat to Samantha shifts several times throughout the novel, just as Samantha herself is divided and oscillates between love and hate toward herself, the college, the Bunnies. It is a very woman-centered story, where all men are either came-out-wrong supernatural creations or secondary characters encountered on occasion but not central to the plot. In both cases the men are sexualized, by Samantha or by the other women; but for various reasons things are never consummated. Or, if they are, it is off-screen (normal "hybrids" are without functioning sexual organs, to some of the Bunnies' disappointment). Samantha’s perspective and story arc for most of this woman-centered story is thus focused squarely on her interactions with other women that she either loves or hates, judges or feels kinship for. Men and male creatures may be involved, but it is the story of Samantha and the Bunnies.
Mona Awad clearly found her MFA program to be a bit self-indulgent, and the only thing more pretentious than the class' writing professor's literary pretensions are the Bunnies as they egg each other on in workshop. Providence, meanwhile, is kept threatening, with the girls breathlessly sharing news reports of recent axe murders and other violence. All in all it is a fun setting and a tense, twisting story; and the supernatural aspect doesn't have to be explained to get the job done, and the book’s own cutsey elements (really? a college named “Warren” in a book about rabbits?) help to establish the atmosphere.