Last night I finished reading Mona Awad’s Bunny. Everyone I knew said I’d love it, but at the beginning I was annoyed by the book. Honestly, I dislike the belittling of twee. I think twee is a great thing. I love passion and appreciation for small, beautiful things. In my mind there’s nothing “better” about being angry or disillusioned. Or the idea that just because someone is rich they are also vapid. And so in the first chapters I was like “well, yes, this is funny, but it isn’t for me.”

But… it was for me. Despite not loving the gleeful takedown of twee, the actual story of a tortured artist and mental health issues was 100% my kind of story. The darkness and blends of reality were mine, too. I loved it. I loved the sentence and paragraph level writing. I adored the story. I loved the themes and the follow through on each aspect of the story. There’s a lot I could say about the book in general, but because I read this as part of my cults in fiction series, the question becomes, is this a book about a cult? And the answer is: it’s complicated.

Spoilers

This post contains Major spoilers, and the experience of Bunny is less impactful with knowledge of these spoilers. Read the book first!!!

Seriously. I don’t usually care about spoilers. I’m the type of person that goes looking for spoilers. But Bunny is definitely a book you can read once knowing nothing and a second time knowing what’s going to happen, and it will read very differently. So, do yourself a favor and get that first experience. Then the second. Then come back here and read about cults in Bunny.

Cult vs. Occult

We quickly learn that the Bunnies are a bit odd, and just as quickly learn that they are into some strange esoteric practices involving turning actual bunnies into men. Or rather, men that aren’t quite men. (“Hands are hard, bunny.”). We don’t get into the specifics of how the magic works, and it’s vagueness is used as a stand-in for the creative process. But it is definitely magic. The women of warren are bending reality to their will – rewriting their lived experiences to fit their amusement. Except Smackie. Of course. Because she’s a poor outcast, her magic is stronger. Better. (As is her writing.) Her magic is unplanned. Spontaneous. Real.

But I digress. Going back to cults, I wouldn’t recommend this story as a story about cults, but more about the occult. But many people said to put it on my cult list. Ava does mention several times that the Bunnies are a cult, but when I look at them, I don’t really see it, which had me questioning how I define a cult.

1. A strong belief system. The bunnies don’t seem to have a belief system beyond twisting the world to their own desires. There aren’t clear rules to the beliefs. They do seem to worship the muse, but not in an overt way. They are their own means to their own ends.
2. Hierarchical structure. There is some hierarchy in the Bunnies. The Duchess is definitely the leader. Her whims lead the group and she decides who’s in vs. who’s out. It’s unclear how much of the group thought is driven by Duchess as opposed to actually shared within the group.
3. Coercive. Absolutely. The Bunnies coerce each other constantly. Not just Smackie, but each Bunny gives up her own will and personality to be part of the group at some point in the book.
4. Isolation. The Bunnies isolate themselves from others. Though Smackie joins the Bunnies because of her feelings of isolation, she is further isolated by joining them.
5. Authoritarianism without accountability. Check. The Bunnies have no accountability (until Smackie brings a sort of internal accountability).

I could go on, but it’s obvious that the Bunnies are a cult. They fit almost all the criteria. So why do they not feel like a cult to me?

Does Size Matter

In real crime, you will find dozens if not hundreds of stories of cults where the cult is small. Sometimes just four or six people. But when it comes to fiction, that doesn’t “feel” like a cult. Why? I’d guess it has to do with the social imagination holding “cult” as the big cults of the past century – cults where fifty or more people committed suicide. Where hundreds of people live in a compound. Where thousands of people are scammed out of their money. The large memberships creates several fictional benefits:

• A feeling of mass. The cult surrounds potential members. They have presence everywhere. There is a sensation of surveillance. With a small cult, the control needs to be tighter. There is suffocation. Whereas with a large cult, the main character has opportunities to breathe when they are around “lesser” members.
• Bigger stakes. Bunny had the highest stakes I can imagine – the soul of the main character. But a larger cult often feels like it has larger stakes simply because it is more relatable. So many people have joined – so could you or your loved ones. There are chapters all over the world, so there’s insidious creep that could impact the world order.

Writing a small cult has its own benefits. The reader gets to spend time with each cult member. Somehow, making each cult member an individual shows even better how a cult can erase your individuality. Even saying that, as a slow reader who spaced Bunny out over several weeks, I had difficulty keeping track of the Bunnies. They were written quite distinctly, but with the dual-naming, there were times I couldn’t remember which Bunny was which. (Except Caroline. Probably because Caroline and Cupcake start with the same letter).

The Occult, The Spiritual, And the Cult of Twee

I think another reason I wasn’t feeling cult in Bunny was because I am most used to spiritual cults. Growing up in the Christian church, my go-to for cults is anything that is in direct opposition of the church – specifically groups that twist Christian teachings. Beyond that, my imagination goes to groups that promise spiritual salvation or growth. In a way, the bunnies did off spiritual growth, but in a very nonreligious context. Religion was not even an aspect of the book (which I found refreshing). Their worship and spirituality was built as they needed. They had ritual, but none of it involved tradition. I feel like cults mirror religion in that there are specific rituals that followers need to adhere to. While the bunnies had rituals, they were glossed over in the writing (not the “interesting” part of the story) and they were malleable – a word that doesn’t fit my imagination of cults.

The other main group of cults are cults of personality – where the cult functions because of a lynch pin leader. We’re talking Manson Family or Synanon. Again, the Duchess was a leader of the group, but did she have as much power over the bunnies as Chuck Diedrich had over synanon? When the cult is small, it’s difficult to tell whether there is a cult of personality going on. If anything, the Bunnies featured the merging of personalities rather than the clear leading of a single personality. They built a personality of positivity and twee that then held each of them under its power. Even the duchess couldn’t break it.

The cult of money, cult of popularity, cult of power… all these things exist. But when you roll them into one and package them as powerful young women in an MFA program, you apparently get the cult of twee. Honestly, I’m so far removed from twee that I had to look it up. Apparently it is excessively cute, sweet, or dainty. Things that make you go aw… but in that high-pitched “is it real or faked” kind of way. Keyword on excessive. Is there a cult of twee out there? Absolutely. As a forty-something person with little social life, I’m fairly removed from it. But even I know it exists. And it’s not just the “oh this is cute!” that I actually respect and think we need more of. It’s the tumbling over each other, naming something as cute even if you don’t think it is or don’t care about it. It is the need for twee. The absolute obsession with it. That is the cult of twee. And like any subculture, twee can be taken too far. Into an area where you lose yourself beneath your worship of aesthetic. Which is what the bunnies had done. So though they practiced the occult, I would say their cult was a subculture cult as opposed to a religious or spiritual cult.

Creating a Need, Filling a Need

One of the main aspects of a cult is that they are able to swoop in and fill a need. They prey on people who feel lonely, incomplete, or less then, often amplifying those emotions so the person becomes more dependent on the cult to fill them. In general, I think it’s difficult to capture in writing because the feeling of loneliness is a complex, often lifelong issue. But Bunny did it so well because the cult created the need and then filled it. Smackie wouldn’t have felt so lonely if everyone else was not a Bunny. It wasn’t an issue of the cult picking off the weak who do not fit into the dominant culture – the cult was the dominant and only choice for socialization. Of course this goes into the cult of academia, which I can’t speak to. It also feels vaguely familiar in the writing cults (which I’ve not been invited to join). But there is definitely a tipping point in which the cult becomes the dominant culture instead of a fringe, and in small areas that tipping point comes a lot sooner.

I do debate whether all of Warren was a part of the cult. Whether the bunnies was a norm for them. Ursula felt like a bunny, or at least she felt like she knew what was going on. Which makes me start to think the cult was not four women, but an entire university. The entire college town. The more your life is surrounded by a cult, the more joining becomes a point of survival.

The Usual Rundown

Cult and Genre

Bunny is literary speculative, resting smack dab in the middle of cosmic horror.

POV Character

Smackie was a cult recruit, joining and trying to leave a cult. The book focuses on the cull of the cult and how quickly you can lose yourself to it.

Cult Stage

Debatable. If the cult is just the bunnies, then it is a fairly new cult, still defining itself. I feel like small cults tend to implode fairly quickly. They don’t have enough people for the abuse to be ongoing before someone resists. If all of Warren is the cult, then it is ongoing, institutionalized, and much more insidious.

Cult Focus

A cult of twee. (Culture cult)

Are you a good cult or a bad cult?

Is twee a good thing or a bad thing. Like all cults, they had some good moments. Girl power. Digging deep into artistry. Finding your creativity. A little amount of twee. Friendship above all else. But then, they really meant all else. It all went too far, rather quickly.

Geographical Positioning

The isolation wasn’t caused by rural mountains, but by a university city. I loved the isolation of the cave as an almost more important ritual room than the attic.

The Reality of Bunny

While reading this book, I wasn’t thinking about cults. The much more important question was “what is real?”. I do think a big aspect of cult life is a twisting of the real. You lose your individual sense of what is possible and what is real. Bunny thrived by building four conflicting realities:

• The individual reality — Smackie’s reality.
• The cult reality — the reality controlled and manipulated by the Bunnies.
• The warren reality — the aptly named university creating the artistic city around it that blurred possibilities
• The “real” reality beyond warren.

While realities and the shifting of it is highly important to understanding cults, I think it is also just a life-thing. We all have a certain amount of reality we are willing to bend. Truths we aren’t afraid to speak into reality. Refusals of logic. Acceptance of the impossible. Maybe we are all just a little bit insane. And maybe the cultish thing is to control that insanity for your own power while the individualistic path is to immerse yourself in it for a little bit of comfort.