Samantha Heather Mackey is an outsider in her elite MFA program at Warren University, observing her four wealthy classmates with cynical detachment. These women, who call each other Bunny and move in a tight-knit hive mind, eventually invite Samantha into their private Smut Salon. She becomes entangled in their ritualistic creative process, which uses intense imaginative focus to manifest physical, monstrous humanoids from the bodies of small animals. As Samantha loses her grip on reality and her friendship with her only peer, Alice, she must navigate a blurring line between artistic vision and hallucinatory violence.
Readers interested in the psychological pressures of academia and the volatile nature of female friendships will find this narrative useful. It serves those who study the isolation of the creative process and the social performance required within exclusive institutions. The text provides a visceral look at the physical toll of extreme loneliness and the hunger for belonging. Readers walk away with a dark perspective on how shared delusions can substitute for genuine human connection and the ways artistic ambition can distort an individual's sense of self.
Insights from Bunny
“We were girls. We were bunnies.”
Living in your own head is safer than trying to fit in with people you hate. Samantha stays lonely because the alternative feels like losing her soul to a group chat.
“I don't know who I am when I'm with them.”
Friendship groups often feel like cults. You start talking like them and thinking like them until you don't recognize your own voice anymore.
“We’re just making things. We’re just playing.”
Creation is messy and gross. The Bunnies literally pull their stories out of thin air. It shows how much of ourselves we have to kill to make something new.
“I was a dark smudge on their bright white world.”
Wealth looks like a costume on people who don't have it. Samantha feels like a ghost in those fancy houses. She is always waiting for someone to ask her to leave.
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Penguin US
- ISBN
- 9780525559740
- Language
- EN
