I Love you Bunny. I love you too Bunny...

BUNNY 

by Mona Awad

Imagine teen-dramas Mean Girls and Heathers mashed with TV’s Scream Queens or Buffy and then located in Sunnydale or Pretty Little Liars’ Riverdale. Call it Warren, as in rabbit, and give the town a high-crime rate where muggings, violent assaults, rapes and random decapitations are common and the large underclass population is addicted to opiates, cheap alcohol and bad food. Then pop an Ivy League university in the middle with the immediately surrounding streets reeking of money, opulent shops, chic eateries and good taste. Then add some bunnies to the mix…

The Bunnies, the villains of this surreal preppy horror story, are four child-like hyper-feminine teenage-girl-women with a Borg-like hive group-think. Teen psycho bitches with sharp minds and even sharper claws who call each other Bunny and think and act as one. 

How fiercely they gripped each other’s pink-and-white bodies, forming a hot little circle of such rib-crushing love and understanding it took my breath away. And then the nuzzling of ski-jump noses, peach fuzzy cheeks. Temples pressed against temples in a way that made me think of the labial rubbing of the bonobo or the telepathy of beautiful, murderous children in horror films. All eight of their eyes shut tight as if this collective asphyxiation were a kind of religious bliss. All four of their glossy mouths making squealing sounds of monstrous love that hurt my face.

I love you, Bunny.

The narrator whose face hurt is Samantha Heather Mackey a fellow graduate who is very definitely not a Bunny. Lonely. poor, creative, angst-ridden and excluded from the other students in her literary workshop, the four inclusive Bunnies, who she hates and despises but at the same time yearns to belong and be accepted by.  She also has one main friend or lover? An art school dropout and hideously woke hipster girl called Ava who has the sides of her head shaved and wears lace-mesh gloves ripped tights and some sort of veil. While I describe her as hideous I think that Awad likes her and sees her as Samantha’s white knight against the Bunnies who, much to Samantha’s surprise and horror, invite her to one of their ’Smut Salons’, that was their ‘own private Bunny thing…something they’d talk about in low voices’. 

Against Ava’s advise and her own judgement she goes…

So far so fabulous but Bunny soon morphs from the slightly surreal to a full-on Daliesque nightmare in which real rabbits explode and boys are axed to death and the reader is left wondering what the Hell is going on? Yet to an extent it works, essentially because Awad is such a good writer that she is able to hold our attention as Samantha’s angst and writer's block interplay with the Bunnies and Bunny-boys of her warped imaginings. 

In many ways, Bunny infuriates because for half the novel it is simply brilliant and that brilliance is the Bunnies who are clever, stylish, sexy, funny and very ’dangerous’. Samantha names them Cupcake, Creepy Doll, Vignette, ‘with her lovely Victorian skull face’ and the Duchess, who etches her poetry onto glass. These are the stars of Bunny who sadly become increasingly lost to us as Awad lets her surreal descriptions of Samantha’s mental meanderings and Id-like projections take over as she struggles with her thesis.

I say this not as a criticism but as a regret because I really enjoyed this novel, which is fabulously wicked and, in places, very funny, but it could and should be, so much more. I want more of the Bunnies and it seems I am not alone in wanting more as AMC, the media group behind Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, has just acquired the rights to develop Bunny into a TV series.

Perhaps the Bunnies explain this novel best.

They smile that tsk-tsk smile again. Shake their heads.

“Samantha we’re at Warren. The most experimental, ground-breaking school in the country.

This goes way beyond genre. It subverts the whole concept of genre.” 

Bunny

Mona Awad

373 pages

Hardback £18.99

Published by Head of Zeus Ltd

They are your children...

These children that come at you with knives, they are your children - Charles Manson

In 2019 it will be, amazingly, fifty years since Charles Manson’s band of hippy-dippy losers set about viciously murdering white residents living the American dream in the Californian sunshine, including the actress Sharon Tate who was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant at the time she was killed, in order, they hoped, to spark a race war. 

Yet all these years later the horror of these murders still resonates and has recently been the inspiration for a number of Manson inspired projects including the TV series Aquarius and, most successfully, the novel, The Girls by Emma Cline. It is now the source for another book, American

Girls, by Alison Umminger.

Both debut novels, The Girls and American Girls (titled My Favourite Manson Girl in the UK) are by young female writers and both eschew Manson in favour of the teenage girls that hung around him like wide-eyed groupies and who would, ultimately, act as his surrogate assassins dispensing death as brutally as any man. 

In The Girls, Manson’s female followers were a kind of cipher for Evie the books young

anti-heroine whereas in American Girls, Anna, the books fifteen year-old narrator, is every

teenage girl and, as such, every American girl is a potential Manson girl.

Less haunting and etherial than The Girls, Umminger’s novel centres on the trials and tribulations

of Anna who steals money off her mother’s girlfriends’ credit card in order to fly from her home

in Atlanta to Los Angeles so that she can stay with Delia, her glamorous, struggling actress older sister. From here Anna progresses through the usual teenage angst and love hate relationships with her mother, always a text or email away, and her sister whose complicated love-life with aspiring filmmaker boyfriends and low budget horror producers provide an entertaining and, at times, very funny backdrop to the Manson theme that pervades the book.

Umminger also manages in a few words to clarify the awfulness of what ‘the girls’ actually did all those years ago, as when Anna is unknowingly confronted with the graves of Sharon Tate and her unborn son, Paul Richard Polanski.

The gravestone marked four bodies. The top read “In Loving Memory” and the left side continued with “Our loving daughter and beloved wife of Roman, Sharon Tate Polanski”. The dates she lived were separated by the thin slivers of a cross, 1943 - 1969. Beside that were the dates for her mother and, at the bottom, her sister. But as haunting as it was, the name that knocked me down was just below Sharon’s, “Paul Richard Polanski”, followed by “their baby,” and no dates beneath the name. No dates below this tiny person who both was and wasn’t, but who had a name.

On Sharon Tate after watching her in Valley of the Dolls she brutally and effectively says:

She went from being a body on the screen to a body in a bag

And on Manson girl Susan Atkins who years later claimed that she didn't kill Sharon Tate, or anyone else, that she had, in fact, just pretended to have killed them so that she could be the centre of attention. So that she would fit in with the rest of the girls...

If you crossed 'Mean Girls' with the 'Lord of the Flies' and weaponised all of them, then you pretty much had the Manson girls. 

Umminger, like Cline, has, by making the Manson girls so everyday, managed to make them both more accessible and more monstrous, so that ultimately they really are potentially just, not so much American girls, as any girl.

American Girls 

Alison Umminger

304 pages

US edition - Flatiron Books $17.99

UK edition, as My Favourite Manson Girl - Atom Books - £12.99

© Nigel Wingrove 2016