Mona Awad's 'Bunny' spawned a creepy-cute aesthetic universe and a film adaptation

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Set us as preferred Among novelist Mona Awad’s prized possessions is a handmade rabbit brooch with delicate hanging daggers.It’s a gift from a reader.

The present was inspired by Awad’s goth-tinged comic novel “Bunny,” which has garnered a cult following on social platforms like BookTok over the last several years with readers who call themselves “bunnies.” Driven largely by these devoted fans, the book’s sequel “We Love You, Bunny” hits shelves this month in paperback, while Awad hops across the U.S.on her latest book tour.The bunnies are so enamored with Awad’s horror-adjacent satires centered on academia and female friendships (and often compared to “Heathers” and “Mean Girls”), they have created their own online — and offline — aesthetic universe.Their videos and artwork, spanning Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, bring the novels’ surreal, “creepy-cute” aesthetic to life.

The fan art features moody Ivy League backdrops with bunny ears, heavy tomes, blood-red candles and saccharine doll-like fashion.It’s a style ripped straight from the book’s antagonists — one of whom wears a pink dress patterned with beheaded girls.

Some bunnies cosplay lace-adorned, ax-wielding characters and post the images on social media, or illustrate them.Sara Ah Sing, a 30-year-old multidisciplinary artist in San Diego who considers herself a bunny, is one such illustrator.She discovered Awad’s fiction when she went down a BookTube dark academia genre-themed rabbit hole.

“I was taken aback by how intense and vivid the descriptions were, and not only detailed, but very viscerally described … Mona Awad is not a generic prose writer,” Ah Sing says.She recalls a protagonist called Cupcake.“She’s described as a person who looks like a cupcake … something like ‘The Children of the...