Happy Bunny and Other Mischiefs - Rebecca Grandsen

From the first pages of Happy Bunny and other Mischiefs, author Rebecca Grandsen’s skill with description and breadth of imagination are clear. Each story in the collection is surprising, shocking, and strange, and Granden is unafraid to make her readers squirm with discomfort. This book is not for the skittish or squeamish, but fans of body horror and difficult ideas will find it full of vivid, visceral writing and an unflinching bleakness.

Granden’s writing stays fresh even when she pushes disbelief. While I found it hard at times to carry on with the darkness and absurdity in her writing, her prose is always lush and meaty. One of my favorite passages of the book is a bit of scene setting at the beginning of the story “Pigeon Clinic.” The protagonist Ray and his girl Faye stumble through a grim landscape of fast food garbage and urban decay. Ray splinters off to make a strange deal with Zack, who needs someone to take his prize pigeon to a special vet. The setup is dreamlike at best, but the details feel real, or as Zack says, “lived in.” Nothing quite adds up as Ray stumbles into more than he bargained for, but there’s something nasty and particular in the writing that makes even the most outlandish and delirious plots feel like they still have at least one foot on the ground.

Grandsen’s characters live in worlds where violence and cruelty feel both inevitable and senseless. My favorite story of the collection, “Seeping Willow,” as well as the stories “Slug Slick,” “Pageant,” and “Gut Punch,” are especially compelling thanks to pairing this dark worldview with the perspective of their young protagonists. These stories capture the great pain of being young: the way the world so often feels like an unfair game with no instruction manual. In these stories, Grandsen calls to mind Roald Dahl’s understanding of that inherent horror of childhood and adolescence, but cranked to eleven for an adult audience. The grownups in these stories are grotesque, baffling at best, most likely evil, and always manipulators. “Seeping Willow” is easily the most sympathetic story of the whole collection, pitting the protagonist Tom and his cousin against his abusive mother. There’s no true “happy ending” possible for Tom, but I found myself wishing he would lash out rather than continue to suffer in silence.

A theme of gamification and the strange dissonance between the characters’ physical and digital lives also runs throughout the collection. The protagonists of “Turducken: Confirm Humanity” and “ReWipe” feel like embodiments of the darkness of social media slop, and “Fuck It Cat and the Mod Hex From Hell” imagines a Ring-like curse that relies on gamers’ inherent savagery. The titular “Happy Bunny” himself exists as some kind of bizarre avatar, tossed into one violent fantasy and then another on demand. Of this thread, I found “Cannon Fodder” to push the boundary between victim and perpetrator the best. I wished that the story’s protagonist would prove herself wrong and find that the NPCs of her world might be less pathetic and petty than she imagines, but maybe Grandsen’s point is that we’re all NPCs – we just don’t know it yet.

“The Boredom Drive,” reads as Grandsen’s thesis for the collection, and maybe a thesis for her idea of writing itself. The opening line, “When I think of what I’ve done I want to throw away everything I have,” feels like something relatable that any writer might say when in the throes of editing their own work, and the rest carries on as a meditation of what it means to create and then lose control over one’s creation. The unnamed narrator describes their vague and lurid crimes, and the reader is just as guilty for enjoying them as a voyeur. Then, too late, the protagonist finds themself caught in their own game – the line between the creator and the consumer is blurred. At times, Grandsen’s stories feel more like watching haunted puppets acting out a morality play than how I would imagine real people would deal with such strange circumstances, but “The Boredom Drive” seems to stake this as her right as author. Everything is a story, and we’re all a bit perverted if we’ve stuck around this long.