But for Samantha, the biggest problem is the Bunnies. There are rabbits everywhere, hordes of rabbits hopping all over the campus at all times, and swans floating in the campus pond, and sometimes you’ll wait at the bus stop next to a handsome fellow carrying an axe. There is an unbreachable chasm between the Warren kids and the townies, who hate the spoiled rich kids who pour into their city each fall. Lovecraft, and (allegedly) literally haunted by a gang of people who run around decapitating people.

Warren is in a New England city, a town that is figuratively haunted by a horror writer who isn’t quite H.P. She came to class with a strong voice and some messed up stories, and very little else. She doesn’t have much family left, and what she does have is estranged. Samantha Heather Mackie comes to the prestigious Warren University writing program as a scholarship kid. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world of the Bunny cult and starts to take part in their ritualistic off-campus ''Workshop'' where they magically conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision.Apple | | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound 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, a caustic art school dropout, in the process. 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 are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. We very nearly did, didn't we?'' Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel about a lonely graduate student drawn into a clique of rich girls who seem to move and speak as one ''We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful.

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