There’s nothing less likely to be evil than an adorable, fuzzy little bunny—or is there? Every year, Easter rolls around and providing both person-sized rabbits giving out candy and animated bunnies twitching their noses. But something about all that fuzzy innocence has inspired some creators to paint it black—to make that which is cute, evil. In Bunnicula, a young-adult novel version of this horror, a pet dog describes the household’s newest arrival, a vampiric bunny. (The protagonists keep finding eerily white vegetables, suggesting Bunnicula has sucked them dry. This does not, however, make the vegetables into more bunny vampires, though they are “staked” with toothpicks just in case.) The novel is more tea-cozy domestic comedy than horror story; it allows Chester the cat to believe in Bunnicula’s vampiric powers, while otherwise portraying him as a silent, odd, fanged bunny who has a weird way of eating vegetables. Bunnicula ends up squarely in the realm of dark comedy—even though Bunnicula is mostly harmless, the bunny’s powers are never explained. The novel becomes about living with the mystery (as did the several Bunnicula books that followed), rather than solving it.
