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 are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become 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 sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunnies, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not suited to American Dark Academia. I’ve recently set aside two well regarded Dark Academia novels ‘In My Dreams, I Hold A Knife‘ and ‘Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead’ because I couldn’t stand the people or the insitutions they were living in. When I got Dark Academia on my Halloween Bingo Card this year, I decided to try ‘Bunny’ because the main character seems to disike academia as much as I do and because I’d been told that this wasn’t a conventional thriller. Both things were true but it didn’t help me in the end.

I was very impressed with the two hours of the audiobook version of ‘Bunny‘ that I listened to. The first chapter was a little overwhelming – like being thrust beneath a shower of stylized dislike. When I finally acclimated the flow of emotionally charged descriptions that that is Samantha’s interior monologue., I began to see that how fragile she was. I understond that her acerbic descriptions of and her demeaning nicknames for the four women graduate students in her class, were acts of self defense and not aggression and that Samantha’s most fervid dislike might be for herself.

The four graduate students. who refer to each other as Bunnies, speak in little girl voices and are stay so close to one another that they are almost a single entity, were easy to dislike, especially when contrasted with Eva, Samantha’s best friend, who describes the women a hiding from reality in the privileged, ego-boosting post-grad world so that I can avoid growing up.

I loved that Samantha can see the beauty of the 200 year old campus AND see that the beauty is incidental to the declaration of long-held privilege that it is the manifestation of.

The description of an evening when Samantha accepts an invitation to spend an evening with the Bunnies, is wonderfully done: tense, disturbing, believable and deliciousl ambiguous.

And that’s where my problem began. There is something very wrong with Samantha and I’m not sure that I want to find out what it is.

To me, ‘Bunny‘ feels like an intense, disturbed, fever dream I don’t want to immerse myself in. It’s complex and well written and I can feel myself sinking into like being swallowed by quicksand. I know that another ten hours of this will be vividly depressing, so I’m setting it aside.

I listened to the audobook version of ‘Bunny‘ narrated by Sophie Amos. She does a great jobexcept for her attempt at a Scottish accent which sound like Hollywood’s idea of how a ‘Central European’. villain might speak. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of how Sophie Amos helps to build the atmosphere of the novel.