Novel lets femininity bare its fangs
Writer says sinister, dangerous school environment screamed to become horror story setup
It’s hard to imagine Mona Awad, with her lovely, easygoing demeanour, engaging with the monstrosities that appear in her new novel, Bunny.
But an occasional sly chuckle during our conversation teases at the Torontoraised author’s darker side.
“I’ve always been interested in horror,” Awad says over the phone from her home in Denver. “Especially the kind that plays with uncertainty.
“Where is the horror actually coming from? Is it coming from this person’s head? Or is it something that they’re experiencing in the world?”
Bunnies, with their floppy ears and saucer eyes, make adorable memes and storybook characters.
In reality, they are also destructive, territorial and will bite if given an opportunity. Bunny, the book, also arrives in a charming package. Its cover endorsement from Lena Dunham and hot-pink type — a ubiquitous colour on this season’s book jackets — do not prepare for the psycho-horror inside. Bunny — the TV rights have already been picked up by AMC — defies easy description, but in the best possible way. It’s the kind of book you might stop reading to go back a few pages, either in disbelief or to savour Awad’s sharp wit.
The best advice is to just submit to the gruesomeness, and strap in for the wild ride through the unhinged mind of Samantha Mackey.
Without giving much of the story away, Sam is the quintessential outsider, a scholarship student at her prestigious MFA program at Warren University.
There are only five students, all women, in her workshop where they are expected to churn out stories — almost at the rate at which a bunny reproduces — and critique each other’s creative writing with honesty and sensitivity.
Sam both deplores and is obsessed with the other four women, who refer to each other by the cutesy nickname “Bunny.”
Sam prays for a hug implosion, “that their ardent squeezing might cause the flesh to ooze from the sleeves, neckholes, and A-line hems of their cupcake dresses like so much inane frosting.”
Her only escape from this clique, with their ski-slope noses and peach-fuzzy cheeks, is her tough-talking friend Ava, who appears almost too perfect.
Ava’s punked-out feathery hair, fishnet veil and mismatched David Bowie eyes make her the antithesis of the other confections.
But when Sam receives a seductive invitation to the Bunnies’ mysterious Smut Salon, she abandons Ava to be inducted into another kind of “Workshop.” The true nature of these saccharine-sweet women is revealed and many, many beasts are released.
Awad’s own experiences in the MFA program at Brown University — where she wrote her Giller Prize-shortlisted debut book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl — inspired the satirical setup for Bunny, which became the creative dissertation for her PhD at the University of Denver.
As an older graduate student in her 30s, Awad appreciated the opportunities she received at the prestigious Ivy League school, but also observed how it provided a “sinister and dangerous” environment that was screaming to become the setup for a horror novel.
“You’re sharing your work for the first time, you’re feeling a little sensitive, a little vulnerable, like a fish out of water,” Awad says.
“Being asked to be imaginative on a daily basis for someone who already has a tendency to live in their own head — there’s plenty of room for horror in that landscape.”
Awad initially found it tough writing some of the book’s more violent scenes, but her lifelong obsession with canonical fairy tales by the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen helped her push the story further.
“As dreamy as they are, they are obscenely violent, but that’s part of their magic,” Awad says. “Once I let myself have fun, I just had a blast and I let myself go crazy.”
Fans of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, which provides a brutally heartbreaking but comical glimpse into the life of a woman trying to find happiness in a body image-obsessed society, may be shocked by the supernaturalism in Bunny. But Awad sees direct connections between her two books.
Both her protagonists are outsiders, struggling to balance the seductiveness of femininity and the physical expectations put on women. Both face consequences by not conforming to those unrealistic standards.
“I’ve always found hyper-femininity to be monstrous, and I feel repulsed by my own attraction to it. I find it fascinating and frightening, simultaneously,” Awad says.
“And definitely like any monster, it has its allure. Because I identify as a woman, it just seems like, ‘This is my horror show, bear witness.’ ”