(“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other ( “Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. 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.A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. 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. 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.īut 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.

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University.

Bunny mona