Mona Awad’s latest descent into madness, We Love You, Bunny, serves as both a sequel and prequel to her cult classic Bunny (2019), delivering a wickedly satisfying revenge narrative that turns the tables on our unreliable narrator. This time, Samantha Heather Mackey finds herself quite literally bound to hear the other side of the story—kidnapped by her former MFA cohort and forced to listen as each of the four “Bunnies” recounts their version of events from that blood-soaked year at Warren Academy.
The premise is deliciously meta: Sam has published a novel about her traumatic MFA experience, and now the very women she portrayed have come to collect their narrative dues. Tied up in Kyra’s attic on Halloween night during a Hunter’s Moon, Sam becomes a captive audience while Coraline, Viktoria, Elsinore, and Kyra take turns wielding both an axe and their grievances against her literary betrayal.
The Art of Unreliable Narration Elevated
Where Bunny gave us Sam’s increasingly unhinged perspective on the strange rituals and violent creativity of her wealthy classmates, We Love You, Bunny fractures into multiple voices, each more disturbed than the last. Awad masterfully demonstrates how truth becomes subjective when filtered through trauma, obsession, and the creative process itself.
Each Bunny’s narrative voice is distinctly crafted—Coraline’s performative sweetness masking razor-sharp cruelty, Viktoria’s aggressive bohemianism, Elsinore’s ethereal menace, and Kyra’s desperate need for belonging. Their stories overlap and contradict, creating a kaleidoscope of perspective that reveals how the same events can be experienced entirely differently by each participant.
The novel’s structure as a series of confessions builds tension expertly. As each woman speaks, we learn not just about their version of the bunny creation workshops, but about their relationships with each other and their growing collective consciousness—a hive mind that Sam never truly understood or belonged to.
Dark Academia at Its Most Visceral
Awad continues to excel at skewering the pretensions of creative writing programs while simultaneously celebrating the dangerous power of artistic creation. The Warren Academy setting returns with its rose gardens, gothic architecture, and atmosphere of privileged decay. The author captures the specific toxicity of competitive creative environments where artistic merit becomes entangled with social status, personal trauma, and the desperate hunger for recognition.
The workshop scenes with Allan (the “Lion”) are particularly brutal, showcasing how academic criticism can feel like psychological warfare. Awad understands the vulnerability of sharing creative work and how easily critique can transform into assault on one’s very identity. The power dynamics between students and faculty, between the wealthy Bunnies and scholarship student Sam, are explored with sharp psychological insight.
Violence as Creative Act
The novel’s exploration of violence as both destructive and generative force reaches new heights of disturbing beauty. The Bunnies’ ability to create living beings from their collective will and emotional intensity serves as a metaphor for the artistic process itself—how writers birth characters from their psyches, how creation requires a kind of violence against the self.
The repeated motif of axes, blood, and transformation suggests that all meaningful art demands sacrifice. Leonard’s transformation from human to rabbit through violence becomes a twisted allegory for how suffering transforms into art. The question of whether this violence is worth the creative output it produces haunts every page.
Feminist Horror with Bite
Awad’s feminist critique operates on multiple levels. The Bunnies represent a particular type of privileged white femininity that uses performative sweetness to mask genuine cruelty. Their pastel aesthetics and baby-talk vocabulary hide predatory instincts and casual violence. Yet they’re also products of a system that demands women compete for limited spaces and recognition.
We Love You, Bunny examines toxic female friendships with unflinching honesty. The Bunnies’ relationships are simultaneously deeply intimate and profoundly destructive. They know each other’s bodies and minds completely, yet use this knowledge to inflict maximum psychological damage. Their collective identity offers both protection and obliteration of individual selfhood.
Literary Excellence Through Disturbing Beauty
Awad’s prose style adapts brilliantly to each narrator. The Bunnies speak in their characteristic saccharine tones that gradually reveal underlying viciousness. Most remarkably, when the novel shifts to Aerius (one of their creations) as narrator, the language transforms into gothic romanticism complete with capitalized nouns and overwrought emotional declarations—a pastiche of 19th-century gothic literature that somehow feels both parody and genuine.
The author’s ability to create beauty from horror remains her greatest strength. Descriptions of violence are rendered with an aesthetic sophistication that makes them both repulsive and mesmerizing. This isn’t gratuitous gore but carefully crafted psychological horror that lingers long after reading.
Minor Criticisms Worth Noting
While We Love You, Bunny succeeds brilliantly as a companion to Bunny, some sections feel slightly indulgent. The Aerius chapters, while stylistically impressive, occasionally slow the momentum of the frame narrative. Additionally, readers unfamiliar with Bunny may find themselves lost in references and character dynamics that aren’t fully explained.
The ending, while thematically appropriate, may frustrate readers seeking clearer resolution. Awad seems more interested in exploring the psychological aftermath of trauma than providing narrative closure—a choice that serves the novel’s themes but might leave some readers wanting.
The Bunny-verse Expands
This second installment proves that Awad has created something unique in contemporary horror literature. The Bunny series operates in a space between literary fiction and genre horror that few authors navigate successfully. Like The Secret History or If We Were Villains, these novels use academic settings to explore how privilege, creativity, and violence intersect in disturbing ways.
The mythology Awad has built—where emotions become tangible, where collective will can reshape reality, where the boundary between creator and creation dissolves—provides fertile ground for continued exploration. The question of whether Sam herself might be another creation, another “Fiction” brought to life by the Bunnies’ collective imagination, adds another layer of meta-textual complexity.
Similar Dark Academic Delights
Readers who appreciate We Love You, Bunny should seek out:
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt – The gold standard of dark academia
- If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio – Shakespeare meets psychological thriller
- Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas – Gothic horror in women’s education
- My Education by Susan Choi – Obsessive relationships in academic settings
- The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon – Cult dynamics and religious fervor
- Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi – Identity fracturing and transformation
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – Gothic horror with feminist themes
Final Verdict
We Love You, Bunny succeeds as both a worthy sequel and a standalone exploration of artistic obsession, toxic relationships, and the violence inherent in creation. Mona Awad has crafted a novel that operates simultaneously as campus satire, psychological horror, and meta-fictional commentary on storytelling itself.
The book’s greatest achievement lies in how it complicates our understanding of the original Bunny. By giving voice to the women Sam previously dismissed as shallow antagonists, Awad reveals the complexity of human motivation and the impossibility of objective truth. Each Bunny emerges as fully realized, genuinely disturbing, and oddly sympathetic despite their monstrous actions.
This is horror for readers who appreciate literary ambition alongside genuine scares. Awad proves once again that the most terrifying monsters are often the ones who speak in the sweetest voices, who hide behind the most beautiful faces, who turn love itself into a weapon. In the Bunny-verse, creation and destruction are inextricably linked, and art demands blood sacrifice.
We Love You, Bunny stands as a testament to the power of perspective in storytelling and a reminder that every story has multiple sides—some of them sharp enough to cut.
