Mona Awad’s 2019 novel, Bunny, introduced us to the lipglossed, froyo-loving, oh-so-girly Bunnies. Students on an Ivy League graduate writing programme, their rough “drafts” are handsome men-rabbit hybrids (the university, modelled after Brown, is called “Warren”), darlings that must literally be killed, with an axe. The novel was a lot like the drink Campari, shockingly pink and bitter, and utterly delicious to those who found it to their taste.
Awad’s much-awaited We Love You, Bunny, is a prequel, telling of the very first Rabbit-Hybrid the Bunnies ever made. Named Aerius, he is, like most masterpieces, engendered by mistake, and then escapes his Bunny creators while being revised. What ensues is incredibly gory and hilarious fun, as Awad makes lacerating use of both sharp objects and literary jargon to skewer current intellectual pretensions.
This is a world where one Workshops (with a capital W) “nonhuman, entity-centric eroticism” with professors who write “experimental novellas” about “philosophically-minded psychopaths”. The shocks can feel like a sucker punch; you’re laughing one moment, splattered with viscera the next. The writing is also beautifully atmospheric in its “perfumed strangling”; with razor blades clutched in white-gloved hands, and hair “braided so tightly until tears would fall”.
The book drips with pop culture (Heathers, PinkBerry yogurt, the Rocky Horror Picture Show) while winking at Borges and the Brontës. However, the novel triumphs when it transcends the cleverness of its conceit to become a tale that astonishes and moves us. The side story of a teacher who plagiarises the students who worship her is genuinely wrenching. With the quirks of its universe already established, We Love You, Bunny has room to further develop (as the Bunnies themselves might put it) its Characters and their Journey.
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There are echoes of Frankenstein, the Mary Shelley novel that the Bunnies fib about having read. Much like Shelley’s monster, Aerius-Rabbit is melancholy and noble, purer than his creators, bringing tears to our eyes even when he severs heads. Finally, there’s the Bunnies themselves. Gleefully villainous in the first book, they are, like in many fairytales, now given a turn to tell their side. Awad endows them with backstories and pathos as they wistfully gaze into Shirley Jackson’s “cup of stars”.
With perfume and pearls, the Bunnies remind us that the most terrifying voices can also be – like Sylvia Plath – the most ladylike. This time, when the Bunnies get their comeuppance, we bleed with them.
