Staceygarrett's CBRIII Review #3: The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

This right here is why I chose this book. The majority of my book suggestions, movie suggestions, television suggestions and life suggestions come from Pajiba. I listen the majority of their suggestions is what I am saying with the exception of music as they continue to tell me to listen to Ben Folds and I just can’t even be doing it.

I don’t actually know who Nick Cave is and a quick Wikipedia search lets me know that I have never heard of anything that he has ever had anything to do with. I’m just not that cool of a person, I suppose. Anyhoo, I wondered if I didn’t know anything of this Nick Cave person would I still enjoy his book?

Yes, yes I did. 

For a second there I thought I was balls-deep in an early Palahniuk before he started writing solely for the purpose of grossing out and confusing every (I am look at YOU, Snuff!).  And I only make this comparison because not only was it pretty vulgar but, for a while there, I had no idea what was going on which is fitting because I am pretty sure that both Bunny and Bunny Junior had no clue of what was going on either.

Bunny Munro is a traveling cosmetic salesman. Think Mary Kay with a hard, raging, insatiable dick. And boy is he an asshole.  A few pages into the book I thought to myself, “Geez Louise, this guy is a fucking asshole!” and being an asshole is where he lives. Not because he is a bad person but because he is the most extreme nymphomaniac to have ever graced the pages of literature. Well, in my experience at least (I haven’t read every book every published…yet).  

Bunny is a womanizing dickhead with no sense of right, wrong, bad, good, crazy, sane. No sense whatsoever, really. The only sense he is equipped with being able to gauge when women will sleep with him and even then he is wrong a lot of the time. And when he is wrong, he acts out like a petulant child. He gets pissy when any woman doesn’t want him. No, seriously. He will piss on everything you own, even your toothbrush, if you reject his advances.

Bunny’s wife suffers from depression, probably because her husband is an asshole who will fuck anything at any time on any thing (If it has a hole, he is going to stick his dick in it). He comes home to his wife and child after banging both a prostitute and a waitress only to find that his wife has gone off her meds and destroyed everything in the home that Bunny has ever touched. She has also locked herself in her bedroom and left Bunny Junior on the couch with a stack of pizzas and liters of Coke.

Bunny makes his way into the bedroom eventually and he finds that his wife has hung herself (this does seem a little spoilery but it tells you this on the back cover so I thought it was fine to go ahead and divulge that). In the wake of her suicide, Bunny has a hard time dealing with pretty much everything including his grief and his son so he goes about dealing in the only way he knows how: selling cosmetics, drinking copious amounts of whatever he can get his hands on, banging chicks, etc.

And this is where he starts slowly, spectacularly, falling apart and losing his mind. The majority of the book is him attempting to cope with his wife’s suicide while also trying to not be the shittiest father on the planet, he fails at both.

While I wasn’t always sure where it was going a lot of the time, I enjoyed the book. I am attracted to weird and vulgar in my literature and I wasn’t let down on either aspect. Still not really sure who this Nick Cave person is but I would totally read him again.