Bunnicula

What if Dracula was ... a harmless bunny?

The Snarf is back after a week off (don’t be surprised if that happens again over this next stretch), with a classic book that I am only now realizing is actually the first in a series. This review is just on the book one, but it augurs well for the others in the series (though let me know if you have actual experience with those).

The Book: Bunnicula
The Authors: Deborah and James Howe
The Illustrator (on my edition): Alan Daniel
Length/Picture Density: 98 pages, occasional pictures

This one is something of a classic that I never read growing up and didn’t really know what to expect beyond a vampire bunny.

The story is narrated by a dog, Harold who lives with a family which also has a cat, Chester. They are both among the animal type — increasingly common these days — that can only make their own animal sounds, but can understand English and speak to each other. They can also read, and the cat often does — he has a penchant for gothic and horror novels and one suspects the author does too.

Harold, is more the Watson-type — affable, not foolish, but a simpler character than the bookish, more erratic Chester.

The pets pleasant world is upended when the family finds a mysterious bunny and brings it home. The story then becomes both about the possibility that the bunny, named Bunnicula because they found him at a movie theater showing Dracula, is in fact a vampire, and if so what should be done about it.

The story has some of the hallmarks of the gothic genre, but it never gets too spooky because Bunnicula seems to only use his vampiric powers on fruits and vegetables. There are some fun reveals around Bunnicula’s bunny vampire powers — In the place of what might have been a much more horrifying reveal in a Poe story, we have … mysterious vegetables. (Poe gets name-checked at one point.)

What really worked for me was the Ishmael/Ahab relationship between the dog and cat. The cat’s obsession and the question of whether he’s going too far takes over much of the latter half of the story. Harold isn’t as passive as Ishmael, but he is somewhat resigned to watching the cat’s increasingly desperate attempts to deal with what he perceives as an existential threat.

The family factors into the story as well, mostly by limiting the movements of the animals in ways that feel fairly natural and also provide obstacles for the animals to work around. Their characters are somewhat stereotyped, but not in a way that gets grating or offensive.

This is a great book for monster-curious kids who don’t necessarily want a full-on monster story or anything with actual carnage. It’s silly in its way, but not like the Scooby Doo-esque stories with big accessible drawings. It’s a successfully delivered tribute to gothic literature that manages to be totally accessible to kids.