Books Like Bunny: 7 Novels for the Fever Dream Fan
Bunny is the rare novel that earns its reputation for strangeness. Mona Awad’s 2019 MFA-program horror isn’t just dark academia with a creepy twist — it’s a genuinely surreal piece of literary satire that commits, hard, to its own logic. The rabbits mean something. The workshop scenes are funnier than most comedies and more menacing than most thrillers. It holds.
The problem with recommending “books like Bunny” is that most candidates chicken out. They go atmospheric but not weird, satirical but not dangerous, strange but safely so. This list is honest about which books actually match Awad’s register and which are just in the neighbourhood.
Ranked by how fully they commit to the weirdness, descending.
1. Milk Fed by Melissa Broder (2021)
Broder writes obsession, appetite, and female hunger with the same body-horror undercurrent Awad uses. The magical realism is understated but present; the satire of self-denial is vicious; and the prose gets genuinely strange in the final third. It doesn’t have the workshop setting, but the social claustrophobia maps.
Commits fully to the weirdness: yes.
2. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth (2020)
A dual-timeline gothic about a cursed girls’ school, wasps, and queer desire that refuses to explain itself. Danforth uses footnotes as a second narrator, which either charms you immediately or doesn’t. The satirical target is the way institutions consume girls who don’t fit — adjacent to what Awad does with Samantha’s exclusion from the Bunnies.
The horror is real and the weird is real. It runs long (600+ pages) and the contemporary timeline is weaker than the historical, but the good sections are genuinely unnerving in the Awad mode.
Commits fully to the weirdness: mostly yes.
3. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)
The cultural overlap between Bunny readers and Moshfegh readers is near-total, and for good reason. The unnamed narrator’s project of pharmaceutical self-erasure shares DNA with Samantha’s social self-erasure in the face of the Bunnies. Both books use disgust as an aesthetic tool and both are funnier than their reputations suggest.
Moshfegh doesn’t go surreal the way Awad does — she stays in realism, however squalid — so dock points for that. The satirical bile aimed at a particular kind of New York creative class is a perfect tonal match.
Commits fully to the weirdness: halfway. The satire commits; the surrealism doesn’t show.
4. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (2020)
Pure body horror, short and brutal, with a satirical premise that doesn’t flinch. Awad fans who responded most to the meat-and-transformation imagery in Bunny will find this rewarding in a specifically stomach-turning way. It’s less interested in female friendship and more interested in what capitalism does to bodies, but the register overlaps.
Fair warning: this one goes further than Bunny on the visceral content and has essentially no comedy to cut it. Approach accordingly.
Commits fully to the weirdness: completely, uncomfortably yes.
5. If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio (2017)
This is the recommendation that shows up on every “books like Bunny” list, and it’s earned — Shakespeare conservatory, intense group dynamics, a murder — but it sits further from the surreal end of the dial. Rio is writing a controlled, classical thriller. The weirdness is literary atmosphere, not genuine strangeness.
Include it here because it’s excellent and because the claustrophobic creative-program setting is the closest structural match in this list. Don’t go in expecting Awad’s rabbit holes. There’s a longer discussion of where it fits in the dark academia ecosystem over at the If We Were Villains recommendations post.
Commits fully to the weirdness: no, but it’s honest about what it is.
6. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
One of the books Awad is clearly in conversation with. The collective narrator, the obsessive male gaze turned into a structural device, the way the Lisbon girls become mythological precisely because no one understands them — Bunny’s Bunnies are the inverse, seen from inside the group rather than outside it.
Eugenides doesn’t go horror. He goes myth. That’s a different register, but if you responded to Bunny’s interest in female mystification and collective desire, this is necessary reading. It’s also in the lineage of dark academia classics even though it’s not set in an academic institution.
Commits fully to the weirdness: on its own terms, yes.
7. Luster by Raven Leilani (2020)
The least surreal book on this list, included because the satirical sharpness is a genuine match. Leilani writes about a young Black woman navigating art, desire, and a profoundly strange domestic arrangement with the same precision Awad uses on the MFA workshop. The prose is controlled and occasionally devastating.
It’s here because every list in this zone ends up being very white, and that’s a problem worth correcting with something actually good rather than something token. Luster is the real thing.
Commits fully to the weirdness: no surrealism, but the social satire is full-strength.
The actual problem with finding a Bunny match
No book perfectly replicates it because Awad is doing two things at once that don’t usually coexist: genuinely funny workshop satire and genuinely unnerving body horror, held together by a narrator whose unreliability you only fully understand in retrospect. Most books pick one lane.
If you want the surreal horror: Plain Bad Heroines or Tender is the Flesh.
If you want the satirical female friendship: Milk Fed or Luster.
If you want the dark academia container: If We Were Villains — the best one for that, as argued here.
The dark academia books canon post is worth reading before you pick your next one, if you want to understand which books in this aesthetic are actually load-bearing versus which ones just own the right props.