Bunnicula Review

This week’s novel is Bunnicula: A Rabbit Tale of Mystery, middle grade “horror” by James and Deborah Howe.  I heard about this one on the Overdue Podcast.  I’ve been reading a lot of heavy, depressing books lately, which haven’t made it onto the blog because I’ve been not finishing them or just taking a really long time with them, so I felt that something short and goofy was in order.

The story is told by Harold, the family dog.  One night, the family comes back from the movies with a bunny that they found at the theater and promptly adopted.  Since they found the bunny at a showing of Dracula and since the rabbit has odd markings that make it look like it’s wearing a cape, they name it Bunnicula.  But little do the humans know how apt the name is.  Bunnicula sleeps during the day, then magically slips out of its cage at night, opens the refrigerator, and (dun dun dun!) sucks the juices out of vegetables.  Chester, the family cat, suspects the rabbit is up to no good, and sets out to solve the mystery and stop Bunnicula.

This is written in the style of a Sherlock Holmes book in a lot of ways.  Chester is the smart one, who figures out that Bunnicula is a vampire, and he has to explain everything to Harold, our narrator who idolizes Chester and is mostly documenting Chester’s logical leaps.  It’s very much the relationship of Holmes and Watson.  The language and sentence structure also remind me of Doyle (which I admittedly haven’t read in a while).  There’s something formal in the prose and the descriptions.  It’s neat that it works in a children’s book and it adds to the atmosphere, to the mystery and suspense.

Most importantly, I appreciate how the stakes are incredibly low, yet the prose creates suspense.  This is a trope that I really like, because you get swept up in how Harold and Chester are taking the situation so seriously and they are so invested that the reader buys into that investment, but the (adult) reader can easily pull out of the narrative and chuckle that everyone is taking treating it like life or death when it Definitely. Does. Not. Matter.  Usually, I wouldn’t like being thrown out of the narrative, but this is an exception for me.  It’s built in such a way that some meta narrative is intended. 

I’m not sure how this is accomplished.  There aren’t moments of the book winking at the reader, no nudging and going “Get it?  Get it?  This is silly.”  Maybe the short chapters give adults moments for reflection?  Maybe the drama is so over the top as to frighten children, but make adults laugh?  How does that work?  I HAVE QUESTIONS.

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Next week: Dreamer’s Pool, fantasy and mystery by Juliet Marillier.