We Love You, Bunny

This gleefully macabre companion to Awad’s hit novel Bunny returns readers to the surreal world of the Warren University MFA program and covers events before and after the original. Told largely from the perspectives of the Bunnies—a group of four unsettlingly synchronized female fiction writers who were students at Warren—this installment zeroes in on the group’s origin story. The Bunnies take turns recounting how they “broke reality and basically reinvented the laws of the natural world,” as they hold former classmate Samantha Mackey—now a successful author—captive in the attic that once served as their creative sanctum. Midway through, their voices give way to that of Aerius, the chiseled, moody young man the Bunnies conjured from a rabbit. Known as their “first draft,” Aerius looks like “Hollywood’s latest Leading Man” and embodies the Bunnies’ collective fantasies. Unlike their subsequent boy-bunny hybrids (the Darlings of the first book), Aerius has working genitalia and human hands. “We must Possess you,” the Bunnies tell their naïve creation. Awad’s prose remains as biting as ever, skillfully oscillating between the lyrical and the absurd. Readers need not be familiar with Bunny to appreciate this outing, though fans will relish the deepened mythology and twisted callbacks. This bold satire breaks exciting new ground in the Bunny universe. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Sept.)