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Bunny
576 pages
A razor-sharp, blood-soaked fever dream exploring the monstrous, saccharine horrors of toxic female friendship.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like eating a cupcake filled with razor blades. It begins as a biting, cynical satire of elite academic spaces, dripping with dark humor and sharp observations about class and creative pretension. But as the narrative progresses, the atmosphere curdles into a claustrophobic, hallucinatory fever dream. The prose is visceral and unhinged, seamlessly blending the hyper-twee aesthetics of pastel dresses and miniature foods with grotesque, bloody body horror. It is a propulsive, disorienting descent into madness that captures the suffocating, all-consuming nature of toxic female friendships and the terrifying power of the imagination. This is a perfect match for readers who crave unlikable, cynical narrators and stories that gleefully obliterate the boundaries between reality and nightmare.
- Mood
- hallucinatory
- claustrophobic
- saccharine-yet-sinister
- feverish
- Tone
- biting
- satirical
- cynical
- surreal
- darkly comedic
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- toxic female friendship · creative isolation · class alienation · the monstrousness of desire · imposter syndrome
- The writing
- Razor-sharp and visceral, seamlessly blending hyper-twee aesthetics with grotesque, bloody surrealism.
- The arc
- Moves from cynical, lonely detachment to a desperate, hallucinatory struggle to anchor oneself in reality.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave unhinged narrators, dark academia, and stories that gleefully obliterate the boundaries between reality and nightmare.
Content notes
- gore and body horror
- animal death/cruelty
- toxic friendships
- violence
- mental illness/hallucinations
About the book
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. 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.
But 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. 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. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
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.
Description from Open Library.
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