A Surreal Love Letter to Dark Academia: We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad

Reviewed by Melanie Marttila

We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad and its predecessor, Bunny, are considered dark academia, a subgenre that Charlie Jane Anders traces back to A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Awad also seems to take the first lines of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and runs with them: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality …” though references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein abound.

That, in fact, may be the mash-up to describe We Love You, Bunny: Possession by way of The Haunting of Hill House and Frankenstein. Yes, there are references to the movie Heathers (like the protagonist’s middle name), and the Bunnies are continually making references to other women authors and musicians, but this is a review, not a dissertation.

In Bunny, Samantha Heather Mackie, a grunge emo who stares out at the world from behind her hair, enrols in the prestigious MFA at New England’s (fictional) Warren College in the town “named after God and fate.” She endures the mean girl bullying of the rest of her all-woman cohort until she is inexplicably invited to one of their “slut salons” during which the Bunnies take literary creation in a surreal and horrific direction, “fulminating” rabbits to create their “Fictions,” after which Sam goes down a hellish rabbit hole. All puns intended.

In We Love You, Bunny, which serves as both sequel and prequel, Sam has published her debut novel (which, it seems, is Bunny) and returns to Warren on her book tour. Her former cohort has returned as well and kidnaps her after her reading. They tie her up in Kyra, AKA Creepy Doll’s attic, where the aforementioned “slut salons” took place, and take turns holding the axe they used in their rituals to Sam’s neck while they recount their stories, effectively “revising” Sam’s. And each other’s.

Though they insist they will not talk about Sam’s novel, they all do, pointedly. They also accuse each other of exaggeration, digression, and outright lying as each take their turn.

The Bunnies have been in therapy, you see. The same therapist? It’s implied, but I think that it’s an artefact of the “hive mind,” this amalgamation of multiple therapists into one. And each Bunny exposes their wound, almost casually, in the course of their recounting. Because it’s not just a revision, but a healing journey, a reclamation of the Bunnies’ creative power from Sam.

After each of the Bunnies have had their turn at the axe, they hand the story over to Aerius, their first Fiction, by reading his manuscript (or Manny Script, as Aerius would write) to Sam.

Now I should say that it’s never quite clear that the Bunnies created Aerius. Yes, they wept and bled on and embraced the rabbit. Yes, the rabbit leads them to Kyra’s and “fulminates” in her attic, and yes, the next day, Aerius shows up wearing or bearing signs of each Bunny, but their later Fictions are never as successful, nor as whole (they’re basically walking, talking Ken dolls, with about as much intelligence).

When Aerius evades the Bunnies (his Captors), and after many murdery adventures, he’s drawn to the writing shed of Ursula Radcliffe, one of Warren’s professors, and she greets him, saying, “It returns to me at last.”

The most obvious theme hopping through the novel is that of rabbity things. The name of the college, Warren; that there are an inordinate number of white bunnies around campus; Ursula’s association with them, past and present; the rumours of rabbit “experiments” taking place on campus; and when Aerius finally finds and confronts Allan, the professor he’s supposed to kill, Allan says “Someone has awoken the Hare God.”

The only rabbit god I found reference to was Tu’er Shen, a Chinese god dedicated to homosexual love, which works because while Aerius tolerates the endless attentions of the Bunnies, he later finds love with Jonah, Sam’s poet friend.

Another theme in We Love You, Bunny is, to return to an earlier point, possession. Kyra is possessive of Coraline, the two having bonded before the four Bunnies became the hive mind. Once the four come together, though, Kyra notices that Coraline no longer calls her to come over every night, and when she sees a tell-tale braid in Vik’s hair (a sign of Coraline’s affection), she feels betrayed.

The Bunnies are collectively possessive of Aerius, their first and most successful Fiction, but when he fails to immediately respond to their advances, they attempt to “revise” him with a combination of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, the Brontës, Kate Bush, and various iterations of Frankenstein.

In fact, Aerius is possessed in different ways and multiple times over the course of the novel. After he escapes his captors, he is found by the Poets, who ply him with alcohol and use his drunken ramblings as inspiration for their “Poet Trees.” He is possessed by Jonah, in the physical and emotional senses. When he returns to Ursula, she also keeps him trapped in her writing shed, “tapping the wound” as she says, writing the work she will appropriate as her own. Later, on the eve of her showcase, she demands of Aerius, “Tell me you are mine.”

And always, thrumming beneath everything else, Aerius is possessed of the desire to kill Allan, which he does, many times, all of them mistakenly. It’s a horrific comedy of errors.

The theme that most intrigued me was that of reality. The early signs that we have entered a surreal world are accepted without question by the Bunnies — of course bunnies are white, year-round, of course there are always dandelions handy to feed them in New England. The writers of fiction are called the Fictions, as are their creations, on the page and in the flesh. Ursula derides Aerius’ writing as “… fiction created by a fiction.”

Throughout the novel, almost every character questions reality at some point.

There is so much more to dig, and dig into, in this novel. The elitism and pretension of “higher” education. Plagiarism. Aerius’ pseudo-18th century prose style, including the capitalization of almost every noun. His misspellings and misinterpretations of words and phrases. The references to Frankenstein, Heathers, ax-murderer on campus movies, and more. But this review is already too long.

And the twist? Chef’s kiss.

Filled with unreliable narrators (really, is there any other kind?), all the snark you can stand (and then some), and even more surreal body horror than the first book, We Love You, Bunny is hilarious and horrific and eerily touching by turns. While it answers some questions raised in Bunny, is asks so many more that you’ll be wondering along with the characters, what is real?

If you haven’t picked this novel up yet, you should. It invites rereading and study and has already been shortlisted for the Giller.

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About the Author

Mona Awad is the #1 bestselling author of We Love You, Bunny, and the critically acclaimed Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. She is a three-time finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, a two-time finalist for the Giller Prize, and the recipient of an Amazon Best First Novel Award. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time,Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston.

About the Reviewer

Melanie Marttila (she/her) is an #ActuallyAutistic SFF author-in-progress, writing poetry and tales of hope in the face of adversity. Her poetry has appeared in The /tƐmz/ Review, Polar Starlight, Sulphur, and her debut poetry collection, The Art of Floating, was published in 2024 by Latitude 46. Her short fiction has appeared in Through the Portal, Pulp Literature, and On Spec. She is a settler writing in Sudbury, or ‘N’Swakamok, on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, home of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and the Wahnapitae First Nation, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner Canada

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Sept. 23 2025

• Edition ‏ : ‎ Canadian

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 496 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1668098482

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1668098486