Bunny

Bunny Plot Summary

Introduction

# Bunny: A Dark Metamorphosis of Desire and Artistic Corruption In the manicured halls of Warren University's elite MFA program, four perfectly groomed women glide across marble floors like synchronized predators. They call each other "Bunny" in voices dripping with artificial sweetness, their pastel dresses rustling like butterfly wings as they embrace with theatrical intensity. Samantha Heather Mackey watches them from the shadows, tall and angular in her thrift store black, despising everything they represent yet aching with the loneliness that gnaws at her bones. The Warren was supposed to be her sanctuary, a place where serious writers came to hone their craft. Instead, she finds herself trapped in workshops with these creatures who write fairy tale retellings and speak in baby voices that could rot teeth. But when an origami swan appears in her mailbox bearing an invitation written in perfect script, Samantha's desperate hunger for belonging overrides every instinct screaming danger. What follows is a descent into a world where rabbits explode into beautiful men, where desire takes flesh through blood and ritual, and where the price of acceptance demands the sacrifice of everything she once believed about art, friendship, and the boundaries between creation and reality.

Chapter 1: The Outsider's Hunger: Isolation Among the Elite

Samantha stands at the edge of Warren's pristine campus, her rejection letters multiplying like cancer cells while her bank account withers. The poets smoke cigarettes and discuss Bataille with the intensity of war strategists, but even among these black-clad rebels, her working-class edges cut too sharp. Her father has vanished into the Mexican desert, fleeing fraud charges. Her mother is dead. The only constants are blank pages and the growing certainty that she doesn't belong anywhere. The Bunnies inhabit a different universe entirely. Eleanor leads them with platinum hair and cobalt eyes that could freeze blood. Caroline hides razor intelligence behind her cupcake exterior. Victoria moves like translucent silk, ethereal and cruel. Kira, the smallest, wears cat ears and radiates an unhinged energy that makes professors nervous. They cluster together in their pastel cocoon, their trust funds cushioning every creative risk, their connections opening doors Samantha didn't know existed. At night, she sits in her cramped apartment listening to their laughter echo from expensive restaurants she'll never afford. The isolation gnaws deeper than hunger, deeper than shame. When sleep finally comes, she dreams of being seen, of mattering, of finding her place in a world that seems designed to exclude her. The invitation arrives on cream paper like a lifeline thrown to a drowning woman. Caroline's perfect script forms words that make Samantha's heart hammer with inexplicable hope. After a year of invisibility, someone wants her presence. The rational part of her mind screams warnings, but loneliness drowns out every other voice.

Chapter 2: Seduced by Sweetness: The Bunnies' Invitation

Eleanor's Victorian mansion breathes wealth and whimsy in the autumn darkness. Warm light spills from tall windows, and the air carries scents of expensive candles mixed with something organic and unsettling. The Bunnies welcome Samantha with embraces that last too long, their hands lingering on her arms, her hair, her face like they're memorizing her texture. They transform her into their image of feminine perfection, braiding flowers into her hair and painting her nails in rainbow colors. The attention intoxicates after months of being invisible. They feed her elaborate desserts and pour wine that tastes like liquid gold, their conversation flowing around topics she's never considered. Crystal healing. Color symbolism. The power of collective feminine energy. But as evening deepens, the atmosphere shifts like storm clouds gathering. The Bunnies begin speaking in hushed tones about their real work, about creation that transcends ordinary writing. They lead her to Eleanor's attic, a space that feels more temple than room. Candles flicker in every corner, casting dancing shadows on walls covered with strange symbols and photographs of impossibly beautiful young men. Eleanor's usual saccharine demeanor melts away, replaced by something darker and more intense. The other Bunnies nod in unison, their eyes gleaming with anticipation that makes Samantha's skin crawl. She's come too far to turn back now, even as every instinct screams danger. They're going to show her something special, Eleanor whispers, and the words carry weight that settles in Samantha's bones like lead.

Chapter 3: Witnessing the Impossible: Rabbits, Blood, and Creation

The ritual begins with deceptive innocence. A white rabbit trembles in Caroline's arms while flower petals scatter across the floor like confetti at a funeral. The Bunnies form a circle, their voices rising in words that seem to come from somewhere deeper than their throats, older than their perfect faces. The transformation starts gradually, then accelerates with sickening speed. The rabbit's fur shifts and changes, its small body stretching like taffy. Bones crack and reform with sounds that make Samantha's stomach lurch. The creature's simple black eyes become complex and knowing, filled with intelligence that shouldn't exist. What emerges defies every law of nature and reason. A beautiful young man unfolds from the rabbit's remains, his features perfect except for a slight cleft lip that marks his unnatural origin. He speaks with a French accent that sounds rehearsed, his movements fluid and precise. The Bunnies call him their Darling, their creation, their perfect companion. Samantha watches in fascination and growing horror as they dress him in expensive clothes and teach him to dance. He exists solely to please his creators, speaking in romantic clichés and gazing at them with the blank adoration of a wind-up toy. But she sees something the others miss, a flicker of awareness in those transformed eyes that suggests this creature might be more than the sum of his magical parts. The power is intoxicating and terrible. Each Bunny has created her own companion, each one tailored to specific desires and fantasies. The attic becomes a playground for these impossible beings while Samantha watches the line between creation and control blur beyond recognition. When her turn comes, she approaches the ritual with trembling hands and a heart full of longing, thinking of her isolation and desperate need for connection.

Chapter 4: Losing Herself: Integration and Moral Compromise

Days blur into weeks as Samantha finds herself drawn deeper into the Bunnies' world. They dress her in pastel dresses covered with cartoon cats, braid her hair into elaborate crowns, and feed her pills that make everything soft and dreamy. The workshops become routine, each one featuring another rabbit's explosive transformation into temporary flesh. The men they create are always the same beneath their varied faces. Handsome, devoted, utterly hollow. They speak in romantic clichés and offer flowers they immediately try to eat, their programming breaking down in ways that require Kira's swift axe. Some last hours, others mere minutes before their fundamental impossibility becomes too obvious to ignore. Samantha tries to contribute, sitting in their blood-spattered circle while a piebald rabbit stares at her with knowing eyes. But nothing happens. The rabbit simply hops away, leaving her surrounded by disappointed faces and gentle reassurances that not everyone has the gift. Her presence seems to improve their creations somehow, making them less deformed and more stable, but she remains fundamentally outside their magic. The pills they give her taste like candy and make her memories soft around the edges. She forgets why she ever found them repulsive, forgets the sharp edges of her own personality that once defined her. When she looks in mirrors, a stranger stares back with glassy eyes and a sugar-sweet smile that belongs to someone else entirely. Meanwhile, her friendship with Ava withers like a flower in drought. Ava tries to intervene, to remind Samantha of who she used to be, but the words bounce off the pharmaceutical haze surrounding her thoughts. She's found her place at last, even if that place requires the sacrifice of everything she once believed about herself.

Chapter 5: The Price of Belonging: Friendship Sacrificed for Acceptance

Ava appears in Samantha's medicated world like a cigarette burn on silk, sharp-edged and impossible to ignore. She's everything the Bunnies are not: authentic, unafraid of darkness, comfortable with the broken edges that make people real. Her apartment is a shrine to beautiful decay, filled with vintage dresses and cracked mirrors, the air thick with incense and possibility. Their confrontation comes at a tango class, under harsh fluorescent lights that make everything look diseased. Ava wears a new coat with rabbit fur collar, her mismatched eyes boring into Samantha's skull with surgical precision. She doesn't care about pretentious parties or socializing with bonobos, she says, but the words hit like physical blows. Samantha flees into the night with tears streaming down her face, her phone buzzing with another invitation from the Bunnies. This time she doesn't hesitate to accept. The choice between authentic friendship and artificial belonging should be simple, but loneliness makes cowards of everyone eventually. The semester's final workshop is meant to be Samantha's debut as a conjurer. The Bunnies select a special rabbit for her, white with black markings and one red eye gleaming with malevolent intelligence. They light candles and burn incense, waiting for her to work the impossible transformation that will prove she truly belongs among them. But Samantha sits frozen in the circle, staring at the rabbit that seems to mock her with its very existence. All her supposed darkness, her outsider credentials, her artistic angst translate into nothing. The rabbit remains stubbornly, obviously a rabbit, no matter how hard she concentrates on her desires and frustrations. When it finally hops away into the night, it takes with it any illusion that she belongs in their glittering, blood-soaked world.

Chapter 6: Shattered Illusions: Reality, Delusion, and Violent Awakening

Christmas break scatters the Bunnies to their family estates while Samantha remains trapped in her dingy apartment. Fever comes in waves, burning heat followed by bone-deep chills that leave her shaking under thin blankets. The pills are wearing off, leaving her memories sharp and painful. She remembers the blood, the axes, the way the conjured men screamed when their programming broke down. On Christmas Eve, delirious with fever and loneliness, she follows a mysterious figure through snowy streets. He leads her on a winding path through the city's forgotten corners until they arrive at a familiar red door. The man vanishes like smoke, leaving her alone with a broken door handle in her frozen hands. But then the door opens, and there is Ava. Real, solid, furious, and beautiful. She pulls Samantha inside, wraps her in blankets, and begins the slow process of nursing her back to sanity. The house is exactly as Samantha remembered, dark tapestries and vintage furniture, the smell of incense and rain, absinthe lamps casting strange shadows on the walls. They spend the winter in recovery, Samantha's hair slowly losing the elaborate braids the Bunnies had woven into it. She writes again, really writes, pouring her experiences onto paper in a flood of words that feels like bleeding poison from a wound. But their sanctuary is not as private as it seems. The mysterious man from the bus stop lives upstairs. Max, Ava calls him, her new boyfriend who appears and disappears like a shadow. When he looks at Samantha, his eyes hold secrets that make her skin crawl with recognition. He's too perfect, too knowing, too much like the conjured men she'd helped create. And when he kisses the back of her hand in greeting, she tastes copper and magic on her lips.

Chapter 7: The Weight of Creation: Understanding the Cost of Artistic Ambition

The truth reveals itself like a photograph developing in chemical baths. The house where she thought she lived with Ava is empty, abandoned, filled with nothing but her own belongings and the detritus of a mind that couldn't distinguish between creation and reality. The beautiful friendship, so vivid and meaningful, was an elaborate fantasy constructed by a brain that couldn't bear its own isolation. Max was never Ava's boyfriend but Samantha's own creation, conjured not from a rabbit but from her desperate longing for home and connection. The failed ritual had worked after all, but in ways she never intended. Ava herself exists only in the spaces between memory and desire, a perfect friend born from the same magic that powered the Bunnies' workshops. The Bunnies, broken and hospitalized after their encounter with forces they couldn't control, speak of accidents and artistic experiments gone wrong. They remember her differently now, not as a victim but as a participant in their strange rituals, someone who crossed lines they themselves had drawn. The truth is more complex than any of them want to acknowledge. At Warren's graduation ceremony, Samantha sits among her classmates watching familiar rituals play out under a perfect spring sky. The Bunnies are there, bandaged and subdued, their perfect facades cracked but not entirely broken. They nod to her with something that might be respect or might be fear. The diploma in her hands feels both weightless and impossibly heavy. She's survived the program, produced the required pages, fulfilled the obligations that brought her here. But the cost has been higher than she ever imagined. The line between imagination and reality, once so clear, has been permanently blurred by her participation in rituals that violated the basic laws of nature and sanity.

Summary

In the end, Samantha is left with the knowledge that the most powerful magic is also the most dangerous: the ability to create meaning from emptiness, to populate solitude with companions who feel more real than reality itself. The Bunnies' rituals were elaborate theater, but the need that drove them was genuine. The human hunger for connection, for understanding, for love that transcends the boundaries of what's possible or safe. As she walks away from Warren's manicured campus for the last time, Samantha understands that the real magic was never in the transformations or the blood-soaked circles. It was in the stories themselves, the ones she told herself about friendship and belonging, about acceptance and the price of artistic ambition. Those stories shaped her reality more powerfully than any spell, and their echoes will follow her wherever she goes next. The future stretches ahead like a blank page, terrifying in its emptiness but also full of possibility. She's learned to be wary of the stories she tells herself, but she hasn't stopped believing in their power to transform the world.

About Author

Loading

Mona Awad

Awad interrogates the complex interplay between identity and societal norms through her darkly comic fiction. Her work blends realism with elements of fairy tales and horror, offering incisive social commentary that critiques body image and the beauty industry. By integrating fantastical elements, Awad creates narratives that examine the mundane in extraordinary ways, a method that captivates readers seeking both entertainment and introspection.\n\nA central figure in contemporary literature, Awad has authored several acclaimed books, including "13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl," which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and "Bunny," recognized as a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror. These works highlight her ability to blend humor with profound themes, attracting a diverse audience. Her forthcoming novel, "We Love You, Bunny," promises to continue this tradition of exploring the fantastical alongside the everyday. \n\nFor readers interested in the intersection of genre fiction and social critique, Awad's writing offers both an engaging narrative style and a thoughtful exploration of universal themes. Her recognition, including the Amazon Best First Novel Award, underscores her impact in the literary world, while her role as a creative writing professor at Syracuse University allows her to influence and inspire the next generation of writers. This bio of Mona Awad illustrates her unique contribution to literature, appealing to those who appreciate both innovative storytelling and meaningful discourse.

Read more