Bunny

The Workshop and Its Horror

In The Secret History, Donna Tartt built her dark academia classic around a group of Greek students who commit a murder for aesthetic reasons and then suffer the moral consequences. In Bunny, Mona Awad goes further: the MFA workshop is not just the setting for dark deeds but is itself the horror, and the particular cruelties of creative writing culture are transformed, through the logic of splatter horror, into something that can no longer be avoided by calling it mere social dynamics.

The novel follows Samantha Heather Mackey, an outsider in an unnamed prestigious MFA program. She is poor, weird, possibly unstable, and not part of the clique of wealthy, well-connected women who call each other “Bunny” and move through the program in a protective formation of mutual validation and collective creativity. Samantha despises them and is desperate for their approval simultaneously, which is the correct psychological state for someone in her position.

When the Bunnies suddenly invite her into their circle, Samantha discovers that their workshop produces not just fiction but something more literal and considerably more disturbing.

The Voice

Awad’s Samantha is one of contemporary fiction’s most accomplished first-person voices. She is funny in the way that deeply miserable people sometimes are — acidly observant, savagely specific, incapable of the professional performance of contentment that MFA culture requires. Her descriptions of the Bunnies are the novel’s comic engine: the precision of her disgust, the specificity of her envy, the way the two emotions are inextricable.

The voice is also unreliable in a way that the novel deploys strategically. The reader is never entirely certain whether the horror elements are happening literally or metaphorically, whether Samantha is experiencing the events she describes or constructing an elaborate fantasy that her isolation and resentment have generated. This ambiguity is sustained throughout and never resolved cheaply.

MFA Culture as Monster

Bunny is the best satirical novel about creative writing programs because it understands precisely what makes those environments psychologically particular. The workshop model — in which writers sit in a circle and discuss each other’s work — creates a specific set of social dynamics: the need to perform critical intelligence, the competition for faculty approval, the political dimensions of aesthetic judgment, the way that friendship and enmity become intertwined with professional assessment.

Awad renders all of this with ruthless precision and then amps it up to horror register. The Bunnies’ workshop is a literalisation of the fantasy that workshop culture implicitly promotes — that creative energy is a kind of magic, that the act of creating is somehow primordial and charged — and the horror of what they actually do in that space is both the novel’s most outlandish element and its most accurate metaphor.

The Body Horror

The graphic content in Bunny is not incidental decoration. The specific bodily violations that structure the Bunnies’ creative process — which the novel describes in enough detail that the reader cannot look away — are images that literalise what creative communities do less visibly: they consume each other, they make things out of each other, they use each other as material.

Awad’s decision to make this literal rather than metaphorical is the novel’s central artistic risk and its central achievement. The horror works because the satire is already working, and the shock is of recognition rather than pure revulsion.

Awad’s Accomplishment

Bunny follows Awad’s debut 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and precedes Rouge (2023), and it represents the development of a completely distinctive literary voice — one that is comfortable with extreme subject matter while maintaining genuine psychological precision and comic intelligence. She is one of the most interesting novelists working in the literary-horror intersection.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Darkly hilarious and genuinely disturbing. Awad uses horror conventions to anatomise MFA culture in ways no conventional literary novel could achieve.