Books like Bunny
by Mona Awad · 2019
Updated June 2026
Book data: Open Library · Taste signals: BookTaste model
Bunny is Mona Awad's darkly comic literary horror novel about Samantha, a scholarship student at a prestigious MFA program who gets pulled into the sinister rituals of an impossibly saccharine clique of classmates. Fans love it for its razor-sharp satire of workshop culture and creative-class pretension, its fever-dream surrealism that slides from bitchy comedy into genuine dread, and an unreliable narrator whose grip on reality — and identity — slowly dissolves. 🐰 If you want something that makes you laugh, cringe, and check under your bed, this is it.
Picked by taste overlap — not popularity alone.
What to read next
Wilder Girls
Rory Power · 2019
💜 Female Friendship👻 Literary Horror🌿 Like Bunny, this novel traps a tight clique of girls inside a prestigious school gone wrong — the friendship-turned-nightmare dynamic and mounting body horror hit exactly the same dread-laced wavelength.
- Matches
- girls isolated in elite institution · friendship twisting into danger · body horror undercurrent
- Differs
- YA audience, younger tone · no workshop satire · more survival thriller pacing
- Skip if
- You want adult literary fiction with a satirical edge — this is YA horror and lacks the mordant wit.
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●●● strong · ●●○ medium · ●○○ light · ○○○ none
Solid = this book · dashed = Bunny
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh · 2018
🎭 Satire📖 Unreliable Narrator🛋️ Shares Bunny's scalpel-sharp satirical voice and deeply unreliable narrator drifting through an absurd, privilege-soaked world that the prose simultaneously inhabits and skewers.
- Matches
- sardonic unreliable narrator · satire of elite social world · darkly funny tone
- Differs
- no supernatural or horror elements · quieter, slower pacing · no group dynamic
- Skip if
- You need genre thrills or plot momentum — this is a deliberately inert character study with almost no events.
Solid = this book · dashed = Bunny
Luster
Raven Leilani · 2020
🎭 Satire📖 Unreliable Narrator✏️ A young Black woman navigating a surreal, claustrophobic situation she can barely articulate — the psychic disorientation of wanting desperately to belong to a world that quietly devours you mirrors Bunny's core obsession.
- Matches
- outsider navigating hostile social world · sharp satirical prose · identity dissolution
- Differs
- realist, no horror or magic · race and class central · more intimate and quieter
- Skip if
- You're here for the genre weirdness — Luster is grounded realism and won't scratch the surreal-horror itch.
Solid = this book · dashed = Bunny
Not similar books. Similar taste.
It reads the grain of every book you've loved — why it stayed with you — and follows that thread to your next read. Not the bestseller list, not the crowd: just your taste. Free, no signup.
Add books you've read; BookTaste builds your taste radar and recommends from it.
Taste radar — read from the themes shared across Bunny and the picks below
Strongest taste signals: 🌀 Dark Surrealism · 🎭 Satire · 💜 Female Friendship
How taste signals are generated
BookTaste's model reads the themes, moods, settings, and reader hooks of the base book, then scores every pick across those same axes — what overlaps, what diverges. Ordered by taste fit, not by popularity.
Start here
The Secret History
Donna Tartt · 1992
🖤 Gothic Atmosphere📖 Unreliable Narrator📚 The original dark-academia blueprint: a scholarship outsider seduced by a brilliant, self-mythologizing clique at a small elite college, where beauty and belonging curdle into something murderous — the DNA Bunny directly inherits.
- Matches
- elite academic setting gone sinister · outsider seduced by a dangerous clique · dark academia atmosphere
- Differs
- longer, slower classical prose · no surrealism or body horror · murder is explicit from page one
- Skip if
- You want female-led ensemble dynamics or genre weirdness — the cast is mostly men and the tone is realist Gothic.
Solid = this book · dashed = Bunny
- Tender Is the Flesh
Tender Is the Flesh
Agustina Bazterrica · 2017
🌀 Dark Surrealism🎭 Satire🥩 A razor-cold satirical nightmare about society's capacity for beautiful self-deception — the same sick horror beneath cheerful surfaces that makes Bunny so unsettling, cranked up to its logical, most literal extreme.
- Matches
- society-wide dark satire · horror beneath mundane routine · literary horror tone
- Differs
- dystopian premise, not contemporary · no dark academia · extremely bleak, no dark comedy
- Skip if
- You have a weak stomach — this is extreme body horror and graphic content with no relief valve of humour.
Solid = this book · dashed = Bunny
Her Body and Other Parties
Carmen Maria Machado · 2017
🌀 Dark Surrealism👻 Literary Horror🪡 A story collection that bends genre with the same feminist dark surrealism and body-horror poetry as Bunny — the female body as a site of dread, desire, and subversive storytelling — with one novella that remixes Law and Order into something genuinely uncanny.
- Matches
- feminist surreal horror · body horror and female experience · literary genre-bending prose
- Differs
- short stories, not a novel · no campus or academic setting · more explicitly queer focus
- Skip if
- You need a single sustained narrative — these are formally experimental linked stories and the reading experience is fragmented by design.
Solid = this book · dashed = Bunny
Frequently asked
- Is Bunny actual horror or more literary fiction?
- It lives squarely between the two. The horror is real — strange, visceral things happen — but the novel's primary interest is always psychological and satirical rather than scary. If you want relentless genre horror, you'll find it too literary; if you want pure literary fiction, the surrealism may feel like a genre detour. It's best understood as dark literary surrealism.
- What is Bunny actually about? The plot seems deliberately hard to summarize.
- That difficulty is intentional. On the surface it's about an MFA student named Samantha who gets drawn into the rituals of her insufferable classmates, the "Bunnies." Beneath that it's about loneliness, the violence of female social hierarchies, and what we're willing to destroy — or create — to belong. The plot becomes increasingly unreliable and you're not meant to fully trust what happens. 🐰
- I loved the dark academia vibes in Bunny. What should I read next for more of that?
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt is the definitive starting point — it essentially invented the genre and Bunny clearly has it in its DNA. If you want something more recent and more horror-leaning, Wilder Girls scratches a similar "elite institution goes wrong" itch, while If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio is another strong Shakespeare-school murder option.
- Does Bunny have a satisfying ending?
- That depends entirely on what you want from an ending. It doesn't resolve its ambiguities — the final pages are deliberately open and strange, consistent with the novel's unreliable logic. Readers who want clarity often feel frustrated; readers who embrace the surrealist terms the novel sets up tend to find it perfect. Go in expecting poetry, not a plot conclusion.
Book data and covers from Open Library. Picks and taste signals are generated by BookTaste's taste model.