Samantha Gets Invited Into the Bunny Hive

Samantha Heather Mackey is a scholarship student in the elite Narrative Arts MFA program at Warren University, and she could not feel more out of place. Her four classmates—Eleanor, Caroline, Kira, and Victoria—are wealthy, hyper-feminine, and so relentlessly affectionate that they call one another “Bunny” instead of using their actual names. Samantha privately gives them nicknames like the Duchess, Cupcake, Creepy Doll, and Vignette and keeps as much distance from them as possible.

Her closest friend is Ava, a sharp-tongued outsider who shares Samantha’s contempt for Warren and especially for the Bunnies. Ava is Samantha’s refuge from a program where she feels isolated, creatively blocked, and increasingly unsure of herself. Samantha also has unresolved feelings about her thesis advisor, Alan Reid, whom the Bunnies call the Lion. The previous year, Samantha and Alan shared an intimate, confusing encounter that never developed into anything more.

Then, unexpectedly, the Bunnies invite Samantha to one of their private gatherings: the Smut Salon.

Ava immediately thinks this is a terrible idea. Samantha goes anyway.

At first, the evening seems like an exaggerated version of everything Samantha already hates about the Bunnies. There are strange cocktails, performative intimacy, and a game called “Absolute Truth.” Samantha participates by telling an eroticized story about Rob Valencia, a boy she had a crush on in high school.

Instead of laughing it off, the Bunnies decide Samantha has given them something they can work with.

They invite her to an Emergency Workshop.

The Bunnies Literally Create Their Own Men

At Kira’s house, Samantha finally discovers what the Bunnies have really been doing during their secret Workshops.

They are not merely writing fiction.

Using a live rabbit, ritualistic magic, and their combined creative desire, they transform the animal into a human man they call a Draft or Darling. The results are never quite right. The boys are physically imperfect, mentally limited, and incapable of becoming the ideal creations the Bunnies imagine.

When a Draft fails, they kill him with an ax.

Samantha is horrified, but instead of running from the group, she becomes increasingly absorbed into it. The Bunnies give her pills they call Tic Tacs, keeping her in a strange, compliant haze while drawing her deeper into their rituals and their intense group dynamic. Her friendship with Ava deteriorates as Samantha spends more and more time with the women she once mocked.

The Bunnies decide to create Samantha’s fantasy version of Rob Valencia. Predictably, manufacturing the perfect high school crush out of a rabbit does not go according to plan. Their Rob becomes violent and monstrous, and the experiment ends with his head exploding.

Afterward, Samantha’s already unstable sense of reality begins to deteriorate even further. Ava confronts her at a diner, furious over what Samantha has become, and tells her that she is leaving town.

For Samantha, losing Ava means losing the one person who made Warren bearable.

Samantha Creates Max

Now isolated from both Ava and the Bunnies, Samantha attempts to conduct a Workshop herself. It fails, leaving her more desperate and alone than before.

Then she meets Max at a bus stop.

Max is unlike any of the Bunnies’ Darlings. He is handsome and slightly wolfish, but more importantly, he has an actual personality. He can think for himself. He speaks naturally, understands Samantha, and possesses a dangerous charisma that none of the hollow bunny boys ever had.

Samantha gradually realizes that Max is hers.

She created him.

But she has no idea exactly how she managed to make something so much more complete than anything the Bunnies have produced.

The situation becomes stranger when Samantha discovers that Max has moved in with Ava. Rather than forcing Samantha to choose between them, the three fall into an oddly comfortable domestic arrangement. For a while, Samantha feels as though she has somehow assembled the perfect little world: Ava, the friend who understands her, and Max, the creation who seems capable of filling every other emotional void.

Unfortunately, Max is not content to belong to Samantha.

She discovers that all four Bunnies are secretly obsessed with him. Max has been texting them, sending them gifts, and having private encounters with them behind Samantha’s back. The supposedly inseparable Bunny hive begins to crack as each woman wants Max for herself.

Max Tears the Bunnies Apart

The rivalry over Max exposes just how fragile the Bunnies’ unity really is.

During another Emergency Workshop, overseen by their professor Ursula Fosco, their carefully cultivated sweetness collapses. They insult one another’s writing, turn vicious, and reveal physical injuries connected to their encounters with Max. The women who once seemed to share a single personality are suddenly jealous, competitive, and furious.

Samantha becomes increasingly convinced that something much larger is wrong.

At a disturbing committee meeting, she is drugged and confronted by bizarre Bunny-like versions of Alan and Ursula. She manages to escape and returns to the house where she had lived with Ava.

There, she finds a giant swan lying dead with an ax buried in its body.

And Samantha finally remembers the truth about Ava.

Ava was never human.

During Samantha’s first year at Warren, she had been desperately lonely. Walking near a pond, she encountered a swan and somehow transformed it into the person she needed most: Ava.

The rebellious best friend who seemed to understand Samantha better than anyone else was Samantha’s creation all along.

The revelation also explains Max. Samantha possesses the same strange creative power the Bunnies have been desperately trying to perfect, but her creations are different because they emerge from her own intense emotions rather than the Bunnies’ collective Workshop rituals. Ava came from Samantha’s loneliness and her need for companionship. Max comes from something far more conflicted.

Samantha Ends the Workshop

By this point, the Bunnies have completely turned on one another over Max.

Their obsession culminates on Eleanor’s lawn, where all four attempt to claim him. Their fight becomes grotesque as they collapse together into a writhing, screaming mass of bodies—a bizarre human “squid monster” born from the same collective identity that once made them seem inseparable.

Max understands what Samantha is only beginning to accept: he exists because she created him from conflicting emotions, including desire, anger, love, and hatred.

And he cannot remain.

Rather than allowing the cycle of creation, obsession, and destruction to continue, Max urges Samantha to end it.

Samantha takes the ax and strikes him.

But Max does not die like the Bunnies’ failed Darlings. Instead, he transforms into a magnificent stag and disappears into the woods.

The Bunnies are left sprawled and injured on the lawn, their hive finally broken.

Samantha Leaves Warren Behind

By graduation, Samantha has survived Warren, the Bunnies, the Workshops, and the strange creations she used to cope with her loneliness.

Ava is gone. Max is gone. The Bunnies no longer have the same hold over her.

Samantha reconnects with Jonah, a poet and fellow outsider whom she had known before becoming consumed by the Bunny world. Their reconciliation offers her the possibility of a real human connection—one she does not have to manufacture out of an animal or conjure into existence because she cannot bear to be alone.

As Samantha prepares to leave Warren, she is finally stepping outside the strange fantasy world she built around herself. She does not know exactly what comes next, but for the first time, she is willing to face it without creating someone else to face it with her.