Samantha Heather Mackey is a second-year graduate student in the creative writing program at Warren University, an idyllic Northeastern campus surrounded by a grimy, dangerous, urban area. Her fiction workshop consists, for the second consecutive year, of just five students, all women. Samantha is most definitely the odd one out. The other four students have formed the ultimate clique. They seem to operate with a hive-mind, to the point where they all call each other by the same nickname: Bunny. Excessively girly and obsessed with all things cutesy and precious, they might as well have been designed in a lab to drive Samantha out of her mind. She tries to steer clear of them and their mini-cupcake, pink barrette, kitty-kat patterned dress lifestyles, preferring the company of her friend Ava, a townie who hates everything about Warren besides Samantha, especially the Bunnies.
So it’s a shock to Samantha when she receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ weekly soiree, which she has always assumed was some kind of dreadful girls’ night extravaganza, replete with bottles of wine and episodes of The Bachelor. Even more shocking is just how much Samantha feels compelled to attend. Despite Ava’s disapproval and her own misgivings, she finds herself knocking on the door of the lead Bunny.
What happens at that party is far darker and weirder than anything Samantha or the reader could imagine. The cultish language and behavior of the Bunnies on campus gives only the slightest hint as to the true nature of their capabilities. Mona Awad is truly in possession of a twisted imagination, and I give her full credit for abandoning reason and plausibility in service to the outrageousness of her capacity for invention.
However, provocation can only take you so far. Though the strangeness feels like most of the point, Awad’s story could have benefited from some more conventional plotting and structure. I would have liked more information on the Bunnies themselves, their separate identities and their existences before they joined forces. I don’t like Awad should have to answer every question that Bunny raises, but the lack of definition leaves too much room for the reader to decide that none of the story is “real” as it were, that it’s all in the character’s heads, etc. I would have liked something definitiveness on just exactly what happened.
Despite the lack of clear explanation, Bunny maintains a sense of raw power, derived from Awad’s fearlessness. Awad steers into the skid, constantly pushing the envelope on what the reader will accept. The Bunnies go beyond obnoxious stereotypes, becoming hideous but hilarious creations. Every time you might expect Awad to pull back, to retreat to normality, she doubles or triples down on the absurdity, until you can’t imagine she can get away with it. Whether or not she does, of course, is up to the individual reader, but as for me I remained entertained to the end, even as I found myself confounded and even disappointed with some aspects of the story.