There’s “dark academia” and then there’s Mona Awad’s Bunny, a novel about an MFA program whose students have some decidedly atypical ideas about how to approach the writing workshop. Published in 2019, Bunny is having another moment in the sun thanks to BookTok, where videos about the novel have been viewed more than four million times.
In a “competitive situation,” according to Deadline, Bad Robot snapped up the rights to transform Bunny into a feature film.
Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
Buy the Book
Bunny
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and seem to move and speak as one.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
“Ritualistic” is a fairly mild way of describing the Bunnies’ activities, which conjure up a lot more than short stories. Bunny has drawn plenty of comparisons to Heathers and Mean Girls, but also Carrie and The Secret History, all of which together give a pretty decent idea of what kind of treat you’re in for should you pick up the aggressively pink paperback. This adaptation will live or die on the casting, and I can’t wait to see who signs on.
No further information about the film has been announced just yet.
