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.
Wow! Just…wow! This book was absolutely spectacular.
The characters were so interesting and unpredictable. Samantha was on the outside and seemed pretty content to be on the outside. She had a couple of friends but not in her class. I thought she was a little bit lonely and lost. The bunnies were so creepy! They had their own individual personalities yet functioned more as one singular unit. The bunnies wore twee/cutesy clothing (I own a few garments mentioned in this book. Should I be offended or scared?).
I love a creepy girl gang. This is my favourite trope! The bunnies were almost cult like. They gave and they took away. Just when I felt that they might just be an intense symbiotic group, things escalated pretty dramatically.
I really enjoyed the bleak university setting. A grand and historical campus surrounded by streets filled with danger. This enhanced the isolation that Samantha found herself to be in.
The Smut Salon genuinely had me aghast! I don’t know what I had expected from this book but I hadn’t expected that.
There were points where it wasn’t clear whether events were happening in the reality of the book or just in the characters’ minds. I am a fan of an unreliable narrator where it’s sort of left up to the reader to determine whether things actually happened.
Every single character in this book was dodgy. They were all hiding something and I just loved trying to work out the characters and get to the bottom of what was going on.
I feel like this book had me on edge the entire time! I feel like I just didn’t know what was going to happen next and I kind of loved that.
This was such a hauntingly chilling book. The atmosphere was so creepy, the characters were so interesting, and the plot just kept me guessing! I also loved the subtle nods throughout the book to the film Heathers, which is one of my favourite films! It gave me almost some nostalgia and I just love this sort of dark and creepy book. It reminded me a little of Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth and Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel. Not necessarily in plot but the general vibes and in the way that I loved them all.
Kapowski Reads 