awad

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.

Author Mona Awad writes and dreams up her fiction in La Jolla, where she has a second home.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

She recalls a protagonist called Cupcake. “She’s described as a person who looks like a cupcake … something like ‘The Children of the Corn’ going to prom. And, it’s like, OK, what does that mean? For an artist it begs for interpretation — and I just have to illustrate it.”

Her imagination has been reignited with the sequel, “We Love You, Bunny.” Ah Sing illustrated its tortured central character, Aerius, as a muscled romance book cover star — with a twist. “Instantly when we meet him in the new book, he’s described with all these delicious descriptions. He’s got all these very specific tattoos that are in very specific places on his body,” Ah Sing says. “He’s wearing pearls and has auburn hair that covers one eye — it’s like a playground for your brain reading that kind of stuff.”

Awad’s vivid descriptions have led to all kinds of fan-led creations. Los Angeles-area Bookstagrammer Michelle Grondine, 40, is inked with five “Bunny”-inspired tattoos. “I have one on my inner ankle, one on my forearm, one on my collarbone, one on my lower back of a cat reading ‘Bunny’ and one on my thigh,” Grondine says. Each of the tattoos varies in style, not unlike the distinct personalities in the book’s fictional MFA cohort.

Grondine plans to attend Awad’s upcoming event at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on Sept. 21 with her best friend, Valentina Feldstedt, who lives in Northridge. The two met online after Grondine spotted Feldstedt’s “Bunny” social posts, and they quickly bonded over their shared obsession. They have collected various editions of the series (including the Barnes & Noble-released “We Love You, Bunny,” which features a bonus chapter), gone to see Awad live several times and crafted Taylor Swift Eras tour-style friendship bracelets for fellow fans and Awad (whom they call “our alpha bunny.”)

“Bunny” author Mona Awad’s spread of her fan art and gifts in her home in La Jolla. (Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

Feldstedt, 30, has her own “Bunny” tattoo, which she says doubles as an excuse to pitch the novel to strangers. “It’s weird, but if you get it, you get it,” Feldstedt says. “And if you don’t, you’re not a bunny — and that’s fine.”

Awad says her sequel, in part, owes to bunnies like Ah Sing, Grondine and Feldstedt. “When readers started finding it online and creating and expanding the universe of it, it gave me permission to go back to it,” Awad reflects.

She walks around her Boston home and plucks up a fan-made crocheted rabbit toting an ax. Another fan, a nail artist, crafted spooky bespoke black and purple press-ons decorated with intricate white hares. Awad says there’s a song written about the book by an indie band from western Massachusetts called the Greys, and you can buy fan-crafted “Bunny” merch on Etsy.

A poster signed by fans at Mona Awad’s book signing for “We Love You, Bunny” at the Center for Yoga in Los Angeles.

(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)

But “Bunny” didn’t always have such a rabid fan group. In fact, when the first book was published in 2019, it received critical acclaim, but Awad was disappointed it wasn’t selling as well as her previous novel, “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.”

“I was like, well, maybe it’s just a weird book,” she recalls on a Zoom call in her literature-lined home. A few years later, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Awad got a call from her publisher. The book was selling, and they couldn’t figure out why. “It was beginning to sell more than 1,000 copies a week, which is crazy two years after publication,” she says. Around that time, BookTok and BookTube had discovered her novel. Next came the bunny ears.

“More and more readers were tagging me on Instagram, and they were dressed in bunny ears, or they had a bunny tattoo, or they were sharing visual art that they had made, envisioning the characters — paintings, ink drawings, cartoons, comics, so many different iterations of this — and then all of these reels and collages that were just so incredible to see,” she says, pausing to emphasize her amazement. “I was really startled by it. It just kind of came in this wave, and then it just grew from there.”

Jane Friedman, a books industry veteran who tracks publishing news, trends and the intersection with technology in her newsletter “The Bottom Line,” says that intense literary fandoms aren’t entirely new. “Apart from BookTok, there have always been these really obsessive fan communities,” Friedman says. “The internet and social media just made it easier for them to come together, making them far more powerful.”

Friedman emphasizes that some critics are concerned that a so-called BookTok phenomenon pushes literature toward consumerism and waters down literary quality. “You can sometimes see authors chasing a trend rather than writing what they would ordinarily write, hoping their book will go viral,” Friedman says. “But I don’t think that’s the case here. It’s probably a mix of timing, serendipity, literary quality and, you know, the stars aligning.”

Awad was born in Montreal to a French Canadian mother and an Egyptian father. She grew up in a French-speaking family, and when her mother enrolled her in an English-speaking school, she recalls feeling like a complete outsider. It was an experience that would happen again and again — like later when her family moved to a Toronto suburb (where, of course, she had a few goth years), and again in her 30s during grad school when she earned her MFA at Brown University.

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1. Superfan Valentina Bunny lives in Northridge. (Valentina Feldstedt) 2. Madelyn Bunny hails from Kentucky. (Madelyn Chimento) 3. L.A.’s Michelle Bunny has five rabbit tattoos with plans for more. (Michelle Grondine) 4. Valentina Bunny, left, and Michelle Bunny with author Mona Awad. (Michelle Grondine) 5. Chloe Bunny lives in Australia. (Chloe Bunnie)

“It was kind of my first taste of New England, which was very, very mythical to anybody who doesn’t come from there … It was disorienting in ways that I suppose were productive in retrospect, but it was hard. It was my first taste of being critiqued. It was my first experience of sharing work with others and having them talk about it with me, and it wasn’t easy,” she says. “I mean, the whole world of the MFA felt like fodder for horror.”

Being an outsider looking in remains a central theme across her novels, including her other critically acclaimed works, and it resonates deeply with readers. The wildly imaginative “Bunny,” often described on TikTok as a “fever dream,” has been translated into 17 different languages. Awad notes that she has an especially huge readership in war-plagued Ukraine, where the book is a breakout bestseller. “It’s so moving to me,” she says. “What they say is that it’s a very anti-fascist book, and it’s a very anti-establishment kind of book. It is about resisting the pull of the clique, finding your own ground, standing on your own ground, and being authentically yourself and embracing that.”

It’s a theme she will continue in the third Bunny book. “The minute I turned in ‘We Love You, Bunny,’ I missed the characters and the world,” Awad reflects. She knew there would be another one. Although Awad has deep roots on the East Coast where she’s taught university-level creative writing courses — her students perhaps not so unlike some of the MFA characters in her “Bunny”-verse — nearly all of her books were written in Southern California, where she has a second home and plans to write her next novel. She notes that a short story she wrote in 2025 for the New Yorker was set in the San Diego area, as was her novel “Rogue.” “It’s been such a generative place for me,” she says. “I’ve become sort of superstitious about it.”

Her next book is taking shape as she works and dreams near the ocean. Meanwhile, her existing work is set to make waves in Hollywood. “Bunny” is slated to be adapted into a film by J.J. Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, and was recently acquired by a major streaming service — although Awad can’t disclose which one yet. She says she’s been deeply involved. “I feel like my vision of the book is being honored, which is really meaningful. Part of the reason that’s so important to me is because I want to honor my readers’ connection to it.”

That deep bond is something Awad witnesses firsthand nearly every night on the road, where her digital fandom materializes into physical rooms filled with devoted readers (often donning rabbit ears). “The thing that moved me the most about going on tour for the hardback — and it’s happening as I’m on tour for the paperback too — is seeing just how many people bond over the book,” Awad reflects. “Not only the art that has been generated by ‘Bunny,’ but so much community and friendship has been formed. You see this kindred spirit through reading, and it’s the most beautiful thing.”

Mona Awad presents “We Love You, Bunny” at Skylight Books on Sept. 21. 1818 N. Vermont Ave., L.A.