This review is also on medium. Toss me a follow and some claps if you read it there, and like it!
https://medium.com/springboard-thought/making-sense-of-bunny-b4c20e02289d

“We never joke about bunnies, Bunny.”

Books that defy categorization almost always end up staying with me.

They force you to examine them, rather than stuff them in a box and close the lid on them tidily and complete. No book is emblematic of this for me than Bunny. I have never tried to figure out what the hell was going on in a book before. And for some reason that is incredibly enticing to me. It’s a different kind of challenge than most books, and it doesn’t hurt that Bunny is incredibly well written. It was nothing but a joy to puzzle through.

Samantha Heather Mackey is a lonely, isolated, insular, imaginative student in a Master-of-Fine Arts program in the fictional college of Warren. Samantha tends to dwell primarily in the written word, viewing others and her surroundings in terms of literary tropes, devices, and structure. The entire story essentially is an uncanny pastiche of her actual college experiences and her final, fictional thesis project.

‘…“I’ve never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another. Until I came here. Sometimes it’s good to take a break, the Lion said to me last January, whisking his tea. Focus on other things. Read. Be a guest in other worlds. Perhaps you’re growing. Evolving. Trust, Samantha. Patience.”’

Bunny is a very subjective experience. I love that about it. I don’t think there’s any real ‘correct’ answer as to what actually happened and what was pure fiction. But it’s fun to try and make sense of it by writing about it. I don’t want to go over everything at a granular level. Just the story in broad terms. I even ignore a character altogether for the purposes of expediency.

Major Spoilers Ahead!

“I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. I pull it out, thinking it’s her. She’s saying, Come back. She’s saying she didn’t mean it. Instead, on the screen is a text from a number I vaguely recognize. Words flanked by tulips and open-armed ghosts. U coming 2nite? :D”

Things start to really get going when Samantha is invited into her fellow MFA students' private lives even as she drifts from her only friend, Ava: A queer-coded art student dropout with whom Samantha grounded herself in reality. This also placed an inordinate amount of her mental health (and unexamined feelings) onto her sole friend. In a moment of vulnerability and emotional distress at her falling out with Ava, Samantha goes down the rabbit hole. This particular stressor prompts her to cope with what happens next by recontextualizing events and interactions the same way she’s been prone to do since childhood: fictionalizing her experiences.

These MFA girls she ends up spending time with, dubbed ‘The Bunnies’, behave as a unit and have some similarities to a cult (which they are frequently likened to). Samantha certainly loses herself in some ways — trading autonomy for a sense of belonging—but it feels like from Samantha’s perspective every group is a cult; at least in so far as cliques in the college go. Which, honestly, feels pretty on point for a lot of the social structures we participate in on a daily basis. Social media. Cult-of-personalities. At a human pack dynamics level, it’s not far off, just a bit hyperbolic in this particular context.

The observer effect of Samantha’s gaze transforms those denizens of Warren college that she doesn’t trust into animals, revealing their ‘true’ nature.

‘She raises a hand up. Is there an invisible gun in it? No. It’s an empty, open hand. With which she then waves. At me. With something like a smile on her face. Hi, her mouth says. My hand shoots up of its own accord before I can even stop myself. I’m waving and waving and waving. Hi, I’m saying with my mouth, even though no sound comes out. Then the rest of the Bunnies hold up a hand and wave too.”’

As the bunnies reveal they have created a ritual, the process of which they call “drafting”, which creates men which are, more-or-less, toys to play with. Drafting seemingly imbues solely the characteristics and aspects of the creators' imagination, revealing these men to be one-dimensional, pop-culture caricatures of the ideal man — which, ironically — renders them unable to perform typical male gender roles altogether. The men speak in regurgitated literary tropes and can’t think for themselves or have sex; can’t even contemplate sex initiated by a woman and don’t initiate it themselves. The mere mention of sex actually makes them break down and cry and visibly shake in a corner.

Though completely unsatisfying, the bunnies continue to create them, believing that they need to simply try harder; again and again, continuing and trusting in what they refer to as ‘the work’.
Eventually, something non-derivative and brilliant will come of it. They have no doubt. Won’t even tolerate doubt, in fact.

This is the literalization of the — or a — writing process. It brings to mind the famous quote by Hemmingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” Only in this process, the male bunnies become a kind of sustenance for them all, too, transcending even a literal interpretation of the process being a blood sacrifice in order to write well.

Likely, Samantha lets herself be subsumed by the group in a kind of madness of crowds mentality and begins to participate in the writing process with her colleagues. Writing fiction and collaborating while drinking. Her hangover is (again) made literal when she wakes up feeling horrible after experiencing the horrific: a male bunny having exploded when she attempted to engage him in conversation. The character as written did not hold up under scrutiny.

Importantly, Samantha has not actually ‘drafted’ herself, as yet. But she begins spending all her time with the group and becomes a bunny herself. She changes everything about herself to conform to the stereotypical feminine archetype she had so loathed about the bunnies before she knew them.

Then, out of nowhere, Ava returns and rescues Samantha from the perceived clutches of the nefarious cult. Suspicious, considering Ava has said she was running away with a man, which caused Samantha to run away to find solace with the bunnies in the first place. At the time, from Samantha’s perspective, Ava seemed not to care about Samantha at all; yet from Ava’s, she now tells Samantha that she had run away from her “no reason at all”. Ava claims she was so worried about Samantha after that evening that those plans to leave were scrapped. She has been looking everywhere for Samantha for days and days and days, and finally found her now roaming about with the bunnies.

But… Ava is gone. It’s sad but true. If not in this moment, certainly shortly after it, when the bunnies find them both in a diner and the dutchess, the leader of the bunnies, speaks to Ava alone, and Ava walks away from Samantha and out of her life, for good.

But before Samantha resigns herself to the bunnies yet again, on the cusp of walking into the ritual space, the rich suburban house of the bunnies, an omen appears to her in the form of a stag.

“I look at all of my dreams and nightmares distilled into one man-shaped shape. All the love and hate I have in my heart plus one fucking bunny.”

When it comes time for Samantha to do the drafting ritual in the presence (and judgment) of the bunnies, she finds herself unable to engage in the process, which is characterized by the bunnies expressing their disappointment in a weird, sexual performance vernacular, suggesting that this process of writing is conflated by Samantha.

“You want to fuck, not be fucked,” Victoria says. “Samantha,” Eleanor intones, “is this making sense?” I stare at them all through Kira’s pink heart-shaped glasses. This is how she must see the world all the time. I look at their dark pink faces, so suddenly grave. I should call the police. I should run to Mexico. “Totally.”

After all, bunnies fuck, right? Why can’t Samantha just ‘get it up’ and perform her gender role as the oversexualized, feminine bunny unit often does and, in turn, expects?

Perhaps ‘the ritual’ is heavily influenced by the men the girls would hook up with or date on campus. The inputs of time and effort the girls fed into them would reveal that they aren’t satisfying subjects/objects that meet the bunnies’ needs and are discarded. They then show up in their writing. Or perhaps it’s entirely fictional characters being written, consumed, discarded. Because the experience is such a blur it’s hard to say. I think, in the end, it’s probably a mix of both. Derivative men both on and off the page — and Samantha being stymied in terms of having no male counterpart as well as not being able to write.

As a result of the bunnies' thinly-veiled condescension and judgment, Samantha feels isolated from the group once again and returns to her home. Thrusting herself wholesale into her thesis project.

“I miss you, Bunny. This summer was so hard without you. I barely wrote a word, I was so, so sad. Let’s never ever part again, please?” Ava laughs out loud at this. Actually laughs. Throws her feathery head back. Doesn’t bother to cover her mouth with her gloved hand. It’s a delicious, raucous sound. Ringing in the air like the evening’s missing music.”

What Samantha discovers at home away from the bunnies can safely be assumed to be the constructs of her thesis: Ava returns again — but is actually a swan; and a boy she knows she has created in her ‘failed’ attempt at drafting, the stag — who is actually the embodiment of the masculine characteristics she needs to defend herself, cultivate autonomy, and remove the emotional threat of the bunnies. These two creatures, the swan and the stag are in love. And, bitingly, as Ava puts it: because she’s a grown woman and not a child, they are, of course, fucking.
Both characters are playing out a fantasy of Samantha’s. She is able to have the kind of relationship she wanted to have with Ava but hadn’t realized until too late, and simultaneously, also hurt the bunnies. There is room for the stag to be the guy Ava ran away with and they just stayed behind.

But I think it is far more likely Ava has been out of the picture and the stag is Samantha. Both often know what Samantha is thinking and engage in a dialogue with her when she’s not actually spoken aloud. And when Samantha is doing something, either may mirror what she’s doing. She seems to be in a dissociative state and this is where the thesis begins in earnest.

“Because you simply can’t sit back and allow your best friend to date an animal man of your own creation and say nothing. You can’t. And say nothing? That would be just wrong, on so many levels.”

After a fight with Ava, Samantha runs away again but intuitively believes something is wrong at home and rushes back. The stag is clutching a dead Ava, revealed to be a swan, an ax buried in her back. Samantha immediately blames the stag (herself) for this but then transfers that anger onto one of the bunnies because, during the drafting process previously, one of the bunnies quoted Kafka: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us.”

In a final confrontation, the stag prowls to the bunnies with Samantha in tow, seemingly completely helpless to do anything but follow. But when talking to the bunnies she is completely powerless to take action herself, even though it is clear they did it.
But her creation is not powerless.

When the stag makes his presence known, the girls push and pull at the stag, each trying to selfishly be the one to possess him for themselves. Though the stag seems amused but otherwise completely indifferent and unaffected, he calls on Samantha to use an ax and split open his human form. A majestic stag breaks out from the shell and bristles — shattering the girls and throwing them to the ground; finally achieving an act of domination for Samantha.

Afterwhich, at graduation, the bunnies sit apart from Samantha with her professor and award her grudging respect. They appear beaten, bruised and broken both from the ‘physical confrontation’ at the house, where they were tossed to the ground, but also appear to have permanent injuries from self-harm. The professor reflects on the damage this year, likening it to a kind of war that they’ve all gotten through. Soothing platitudes are exchanged. And the college experience comes to an end. And this is to say nothing of a few subplots and two characters altogether which further enrich the story.

Bunny is anything but a typical reading experience. It is a brilliant amalgamation and study of how cultural consciousness views the college experience, gender roles, sexual coming-of-age, the horror of losing agency and autonomy, and just generally being the kid that is left of center in a heavily tribalistic, non-sensical world.

“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?”, my mother always asked me. “I don’t know”, I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”