Back to school reading: Dionysian cult edition
Lean into the mythological inspired collegiate debauchery, with book reviews of Bunny by Mona Awad and A Secret History by Donna Tartt
Coming up from the bibliostream: If you’re a millennial like me, you might remember the chilling black and white covers of the iconic Scary Stories books from your childhood sleepovers. Next month I’ll be sharing short story collections exploring liminal spaces, feminist nightmares, and haunting folklore.
Ah, the fantasy of the Dionysian cult. Raucous romps in the woods, lascivious guzzling of cheap wine, and what I imagine were some very chilly naked dances around the fire. But who’s thinking of the cold when you’re swilling a glass of ergot in your bronze goblet? As September brings its crisp breeze, not only am I devouring ripe figs and floral Bronx grapes, but I’m craving blustery stories. If they have a mythological leaning, and the nostalgia of back-to-school, even better.
I wistfully daydream of returning to campus each September. I could leave out the exams and cramming, but I revel in the anticipation of a fresh roster of classes, poring over the syllabus and assigned readings. Discovering allies to spend late nights with studying, becoming enraptured by ideas I’ve never thought of before. All encompassed by the enchanting equinox light, and chilled air telling of dark nights soon to come.
For your Autumn reading, I’m sharing two contemporary novels. Both might inspire you to apply to your fantasy graduate program, and perhaps start a folklore-inspired cult on campus. If anything you’ll be donning plaid-woolen skirts or a splash of argyle. Who knew there was a subgenre of “New England liberal arts students form a secret cult-like group with bloody rituals that leads to mayhem”? I dove right in.
Put a few decorative gourds out for protection, and cozy up with Bunny by Mona Awad, or A Secret History by Donna Tart.
Bunny - Mona Awad
“The pink pony inside me weeps softly.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
Samantha, a loner outsider, is admitted to a prestigious narrative arts graduate program in a spooky New England town with a bad rep for decapitations. Her cohort is a clique of four ‘bunnies’, as they saccharinely call each other. They wear rainbow kitten dresses with Peter Pan collars, etch poems on glass tablets, and smell like cupcake frosting.
“She looks so much like a cupcake that when I first met her at orientation, I had a very real desire to eat her. Bite deeply into her white shoulder. Dig a fork in her cheek.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
Despite her resentment towards the bunnies, Samantha is invited one evening to their “Smut Salon”, a cocktail-infused erotic-literary group show & tell. She gets wasted on the green drink they’ve named after her, they demand she tell them ‘something erotic’ and she embarrassingly babbles on about a high school crush, and the night ends when they send her on a blurry quest in the front yard to catch a bunny donning a red hooded cape. Floppy-eared creatures seem to be watching her in the days that follow, and her world unravels from there. Bunnies are sacrificed, bumbling man slaves with paws are summoned from the void, and the horror unfolds in a womb-like avant-garde writing workshop. I noticed some reviewers say the book accurately depicts the lived experience of an MFA program - tortured, delusional, and dripping with self-doubt.
“Three bunny explosions later, in which the ax gets bloodier and bloodier, the air becoming thick with the scent of dead bunny and boy, Odysseus IV is before us.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
Awad has finely honed the craft of conveying a descent into madness. Her prose unwinds and quickens as the protagonist loses her grasp on reality. Dialogue becomes fuzzy, speakers blur into each other becoming one. The tension becomes palpable as the bunnies burrow in over their heads with their ‘experimental performance-based’ creative endeavor of conjuring men via bunny sacrifice. The author unabashedly goes there, she’s not afraid to get messy. The glitter bomb of the characters fully crumbling is a reminder of how tantalizing maximalism can be in storytelling. You can’t stop reading their, shiny, lip gloss slide into derangement (“because lipstick is for whores”). In all of its gruesome horror and cringey moments, it’s delightful to fall down Awad’s rabbit hole.
While reading this book, I recommend tossing out any hard-held definitions of reality. I’m not including plot spoilers here intentionally, but the story gets pretty wild. Samantha discovers her mastery of the sacrificial ritual when she summons a fierce f*** boy from a lone stag. You begin to question whether characters or experiences exist only in Samantha’s mind, or conversely, if she is a supernatural being. You wonder if the tic-tacs they keep popping are something stronger. If there was any negative to the novel, it might be the lack of clarity the plot takes near the end, but I like a story to have a few loose threads. It’s a sign of a well-crafted story if questions remain after you shut the book.
“I swallow. My hands ungrip the cliff. Trust. I will not fall, I will float. Up into their high blue sky full of fluffy clouds and rainbows. Up, up, up into the pink mist and the laughing light.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
I devoured this novel over Labor Day weekend while jet lagged and too lethargic to do anything much but lay in bed and read. I shamefully love a wacky girl-clique adventure. Bunny goes beyond where Mean Girls, Heathers, or even The Craft, went. As a woman, I know the potential not only for astonishing collective power but also ruthlessness, that can arise from a tight group of friends. Or the pure delight of wearing a matching onesie to work out with your bestie.
“Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”
― Mona Awad, Bunny
The scenes in the Smut Salon were a reminder of my own girl’s nights of the past; sickly sweet cocktail experiments, frenzied dancing to WAP, falling asleep with a pan of brownies in bed, and the urge to disclose the deepest of secrets. When you wipe away the cupcake frosting and bunny blood, Bunny speaks to friendship and loneliness. What it feels like to be an outsider who desperately wants a companion to sip crummy diner coffee with while writing.
A Secret History - Donna Tartt
“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
A Secret History tells you from the start the harrowing crime a group of undergraduates will lead themselves to commit. Tucked away in rural Vermont, the story unfolds on the campus of a small liberal arts college. The central characters are five students in one charismatic professor’s unconventional and elite Classics major, all bound together by their devotion to the Greek language. The crew consists of well-funded intellectual outcasts, and one young man, Richard, on scholarship. He has found himself in the program by happenstance after leaving a dead-end life and vacant parents in Southern California.
Tartt slowly builds the tension. She tells you early on the circumstances of a murder within the group, and you eagerly turn the pages to discover how it all unfolds. Thousands of cigarettes are inhaled, and many liters of whiskey are imbibed by the neurotic, eccentric students. She delicately paints the turn of the seasons, time moving forward as the characters shed their layers. Her writing is attentive, not too sparse, and the imagery is stunning yet doesn’t dominate.
“And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
She carefully reveals what lies beneath the surface of the languishing privilege the students seem to live with. At first, Richard is intimidated and dazzled by their weekends at the countryside mansion and lavish meals at the bistro. He hides his poverty from them, even to the extent of risking his life spending the winter in a barn with no heating. Whispers in the hallway at night hint that he isn’t fully their confidante, and the imperfections in their life of luxury slowly come into focus. Inner demons rise to the surface as their dark communal secret wears them down. The facade of coeds wiling away their days with intoxicated croquet in an empty countryside manor evaporates.
“Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees. Things would have been terrible strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Each character is beautifully complicated. The antagonist, Edmund (nickname Bunny), itches like a worrisome rash, his voice squawking like an unwelcome nightingale outside your bedroom. You grow to despise him, even though he is quite in the right to want to expose the group for a crime committed amidst one of their mind-bending and carnal Dionysian experiments. Camille, the only woman in the group, shimmers stoically with her cold gray eyes, and irreproachable demeanor. I was curious if she and her twin brother were loosely inspired by Artemis and Apollo, divine archers, two sides of the same coin. Henry becomes the most intriguing of the group. He is wealthy, stone-cold, and the one who suggested they explore reenacting the Dionysian rituals themselves. I found myself resenting the character’s collective short-sightedness, selfishness, and reckless secrecy. But I also wanted to know what was driving them to such depths.
“We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
I found myself aching to lay in the bed of the clapboard dormitory gazing at the Vermont moon, and watch the birch turn gold. The dreamy atmosphere feels modern, but ebbs with nostalgia for a time already passed. A time when cigarettes weren’t known to cause cancer yet, and you could thoughtlessly indulge in a Classics degree. I appreciated how the story moved forward at a tempered pace, building tension. My only critique was near the end of the story, well after the climax of the murder, I found myself losing steam, wondering where else the story would go.
End notes
Where Bunny is an MFA barbie-horror explosion, A Secret History is a paced exploration of the depths of depravity and human capacity for violence, a somber Greek tragedy.
They both exploit the edges of academic fantasy. Tapping into those young moments of making your first adult friends in a college class, the anxiety of social acceptance, and academic performance. Preparing your school bag for the first day, and stepping into the classroom where it feels like anything could happen, including murder and witchcraft. School is such a relatable setting, there’s a reason why so many movies have been made on campus. It’s a perfect container for a small collection of characters to simmer in, and to contrast the formal tidiness of the classroom with what happens after hours.
Secret societies and animalic behavior are nothing new to higher education. The fraternities and sororities of US colleges are rooted in the secret initiation tradition of the Freemasons (Anne Helene Peterson did a fantastic series on the Greek system at University of Alabama if you want to dive deep into that world). It's a delight to see two authors use debauchery in higher ed as a plot vehicle in very different ways.
In Bunny, the gory details of their sacrifices and experiments as tulpamancers are front and center. We are peripherally told the group in A Secret History has been reenacting the Dionysian rituals with various drugs and breath-work, but we don’t ever get a clear view on what actually happened during their ecstatic romps, only hints at the blood and sex.
If you want to lose yourself in a collegiate fantasy, I highly recommend them both. Bunny if you’re looking for a bit more of a psychedelic fairy tale, and A Secret History if you’re the brooding type. If you have a degree in creative writing or the classics, both might hit a chord. Have I been inspired by either of these books? Well, I’ll be dressing my Chihuahua as Dionysus this Halloween, and I’ll be the Maenad at his side.
If you enjoyed either of these, share your own review below, or if you have suggestions for other books or movies on the same theme I’d love to hear them.
Coming up from bibliostream: If you’re a millennial like me, you might remember the chilling black and white covers of the iconic Scary Stories books from your childhood sleepovers. Next month I’ll be sharing short story collections exploring liminal spaces, feminist nightmares, and haunting folklore.