ona Awad’s Bunny is set on the grounds of Warren University, where the lead protagonist, Samantha Heather Mackey, attends the prestigious MFA programme. Her fellow students include a clique of statuesque, hyper-feminine girls who call one another Bunny.

Early in the novel, Mackay is shown to be content with her best friend, Broody, the misanthropic Ava. However, after being invited to a salon hosted by the Bunnies, we see her funnelled into a world that boasts the facade of a fairytale but hides a convulsively eerie heart. In one of the early chapters of the book, we are introduced to the Bunnies by the pet names bestowed on them by Mackay;

“The Duchess in turning towards us, causes a ripple effect of turning among the other Bunnies. First Cupcake looks over. Then Creepy Doll with her tiger eyes. Then Vignette with her lovely Victorian face. They each look at Ava, then me, in turn, scanning down from our heads to our feet, their eyes taking us in like little mouths sipping strange drinks. As they do, their noses twitch, their eyes do not blink but stare and stare. Then they look back at the Duchess and lean into each other, their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words.”

One of the more compelling aspects of Awad’s writing is her unnerving attunement to the aesthetic qualities of the Bunnies. They are described as twee yet laced with jolts of Gothic profundity. They are perfumed to the degree that what they eat must also overflow with fragrance. They are curious edible specimens, not to the degree to which ordinary femininity aspires, but to another scale, where their prettiness is almost hallucinogenic and ultimately forbidding.

In subverting the archetype of the cliques we see dominating classic rom-coms and popular fiction, Awad foregrounds the bemusing deathliness at the core of these micro-cults. The Bunnies are beautiful, and the reader is meant to understand them, but there is also a cadaverousness to them that should make us uncomfortable. We can see this clearly in the passage below where Mackay is describing a Bunny fittingly called Cupcake:

“I am staring into the eyes of the one I call Cupcake. Because she looks like a cupcake. Dresses like a cupcake. Gives of a scent of baked lemony sugar. Pretty in a way that reminds you of frosting flourishes. Not the forest green and electric blue horrors in the supermarket but the pastel kind that is used at weddings and tasteful Easter gatherings.”

Through the clever stippling of the trope of the extravagantly perfumed and curated woman, Awad conveys the frightening aspects of a womanhood that is painstakingly manufactured. Awad captures the unnerving aspects of this laminated allure in such language that the reader is spellbound.

Later on in the novel, the trope of a conventional literary salon is turned around. Hosted by the Bunnies, the salons in the novel are gatherings where romanticised versions of Little Red Riding Hood are read aloud in red cloaks. Julie Kristeva is read as well as Marguerite Duras. Sky coloured drinks are passed around and enchanting poems by Ondaatje are recited.

It is a powerfully vulnerable love-letter to the imagination, of how it can engender worlds of both monsters and saints, and, also of how it can debilitate creators, leading them to strange and numinous places.

As with most of the novel, the setting aggrandises the narrative, blooming hotly in a lush, venomous miasma. As the clock ticks on, and our narrator, Mackay, is lulled into a Keatsian stupor by the Bunnies, the novel enters the heart of darkness, if you will, and the salon erupts into a riotous seance. Figures of romantic lore like Lancelot and Odysseus are bewitched into being, as well as love interests from Mackay’s past.

As Mackay soon learns, the Bunnies are aspiring to be the exponents of a creativity that is not limited to the page but is instead divinely initiated. In Bunny, the gush of inspiration is not taken lightly; it is likened to an incantation and the conjuring of fleshed characters who have the power to inflict bitter wounds or incite passionate love. By doing so, this novel becomes more than a coming-of-age story centred on Mackay, doubling into a meta-story on the perilous and fraught act of writing itself.

The Bunnies represent a challenge to all the beliefs that Mackay holds dear about herself and about the world. There are many bloody epiphanies through the course of the novel, where phantom-like creatures enter the fray in part-thriller, part-horror-inspired twists.

Mackay’s past is revealed in moving vignettes, making the reader more curious about what brought her to her current state. As the novel’s tenor darkens, the reader become more engrossed by the motivations that flame her writing and her rarefied, ghoulish bent of mind.

There is humour in abundance. The chapters that focus on the salons and the writing workshops at Warren are deliciously wacky. The critique that the group members offer to one another is wildly personal and almost hilariously visceral. For example, one of the more experimental writers, Victoria, is lacerated with the following analysis:

“Whenever I read one of Victoria’s vignettes, I always feel so dumb because I can hardly understand them at all. And then I blame myself. I think, Kira, this must be just too brilliant for you to grasp. Surely you must have missed something. This is coy and this is willfully obscure and no one but Victoria will ever get this. I would in fact need to live inside Victoria’s spoiled, fragmented, lazy, pretentious little mind to get it. And who apart from us, apart from me, is going to be willing to do that?”

Mackay, on the other hand, is subjected to disparaging comments about the linearity of her work, of how it shies away from experimentation, and lacks avant-garde playfulness. Several chapters are dedicated to the proverbial ghosts that upend Mackay’s writing process and her subsequent attempts to reconnect to some vestige of gritty reality.

Bunny is a powerfully vulnerable love-letter to the imagination, of how it can engender worlds of both monsters and saints, and, also of how it can debilitate creators, leading them to strange and numinous places.

For all its dazzling devices and eccentric characterisation, Bunny is, at its heart, a novel about craft and all the unearthly, agonising forays that one must make to create something unforgettable. With Bunny, Awad has done just that.

Bunny

Author: Mona Awad

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 272, Paperback

Price: Rs 2,495

The reviewer is a columnist and a senior contributing editor at The Aleph Review