She is kind of like the classic outsider, but she’s lonely and that makes her very susceptible prey to the Bunnies. I always thought that I would write a great horror novel, just kind of blowing some of the stuff that is part of MFA culture. It just seemed like there was a lot in that world that had the potential for horror. I was doing an MFA, and then I went on to do a Ph.D in Creative Writing. Like The Craft, where there’s an insider clique of witches. MONA AWAD: Definitely Heathers, and all those teen movies that cultivate that sort of insider/outsider dynamic. What are the roots and cultural influences behind them as a collective unit? SARAH NECHAMKIN: The Bunnies are obviously the central force of the novel. Below, Awad and I dissect the bunny, in all its varied symbolism, and the persistent cultural fascination with the female clique.

It’s no wonder the book has already been optioned by AMC to become a TV series. Her incisive humor and razor-sharp writing, punctuated with references to postmodern literary theory and the whole range of the emoji keyboard, melds the current with the surreal, the twee with the violent. It’s a monster that I’ll never be able to resist.” The Boston-based author, who also wrote 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, plays delicately with feminine cliches and the oft-hollow pretenses of the graduate collegiate world. “There’s always been to me something kind of horrific about that. “ The Bunnies are so hyper-feminine,” Awad tells me over an appropriately quaint miniature cortado. The novel is set at a fictional, idyllic college campus in New England among a particular group of well-coiffed MFA writing students who nibble on mini cupcakes and call one another “Bunny.” Following the cardinal logic of a teen movie à la Heathers, a cynical outsider, Samantha, is drawn by magnetic force to the allure of the Bunnies, gradually ensorcelled by their “creative workshops,” in which they transform real, live bunnies into real, live men-complete with brooding, blue-eyed gazes and Proust. In Mona Awad’s new novel, Bunny (out today from Penguin) the figure embodies all of that, blown up-literally-and melded into male fantasy. The bunny is perhaps the singular most versatile mammalian image in modern culture: one of innocence, one of sex, one of lateness, one of sheer horror.

Bunny awad