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    Bunny Lake Is Missing
    Bunny Lake Is Missing
    Bunny Lake Is Missing
    Ebook293 pages4 hours

    Bunny Lake Is Missing

    By Evelyn Piper

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The classic novel of suspense is “a headlong story of nerve-wracking tension, psychological validity and emotional drive” (Oakland Tribune).
     
    Blanche Lake is not like the other mothers who come to collect their children at the local nursery school on New York’s Upper East Side. She lives alone, has a job, and has never been married. It’s the first day of school when this story begins, and Blanche is eager to see how her daughter, Bunny, has fared away from home. But her expectant waiting becomes a mother’s most dreaded nightmare: Bunny never materializes. Neither teachers nor students recall the small girl, and soon Blanche is engaged in a frantic search for any trace of her missing daughter. And the worst part is . . . no one believes her. In this fraught and at times freakish tale of suspense, Evelyn Piper takes us deep into the psyche of the 1950s to explore American fetishes, fallacies, and fears around motherhood and sexuality. Blanche emerges as a new kind of heroine—a hard-boiled mom with gun in hand, willing to take any risk to find her missing daughter.
     
    “A classic thriller—a riveting revisit to the dark side of the fifties, where the tension beneath the calm surface has an undertow that drags the reader into its grip. Prime pulp—pure pleasure.” —Linda Fairstein, author of The Bone Vault
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 1, 2012
    ISBN9781558617759
    Bunny Lake Is Missing
    Author

    Evelyn Piper

    Merriam Modell, pen name Evelyn Piper, was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1908. She is known for writing mystery thrillers of intricate, suspenseful plotting that depict the domestic conflicts of American families. Her short stories have appeared in the The New Yorker and two of her novels, Bunny Lake Is Missing and The Nanny, were adapted into major Hollywood films.

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    Reviews for Bunny Lake Is Missing

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      You pick your three-year-old daughter up from her first day of pre-school. You wait with all of the other mothers, none of whom you know since you are new in town and on your own, as they watch their children come down the stairway. You wait. And wait. But your daughter does not appear. You look for her, for her teacher, but you can't find either. You panic when the school administration tells you they have no record of your daughter even registering for pre-school let alone attending the first day. The police show up, and you beg them to start searching for your daughter, but they seem hesitant. Soon you understand that everyone believes you don't even have a daughter at all. Blanche Lake faces a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances in Evelyn Piper's novel Bunny Lake is Missing. She has just moved to New York City, not all of her belongings have arrived so she has no pictures of her daughter to show the police officers who doubt she exists. She has kept a low profile because she is not married to her daughter's father so no one at the office where she works even knows she has a child. One thing after another that might help her prove her child exists, fails to materialize for some reason, leaving Blanche on her own, searching the city streets throughout the novel in a Kafkaesque nightmare.I've written before about the pleasure of the suspense in classic pulp fiction thrillers like Bunny Lake is Missing. The situation is basic, a mother searches for the daughter only she believes is real. We're spared the gory details that have become so common in today's crime thrillers. Ms. Piper can generate suspense to spare from this simple situation without invoking the latest in ritualistic serial murderers. It's interesting to me to find that Bunny Lake is Missing has been reprinted by The Feminist Press because it's difficult to see how this novel is feminist at all. Blanche appears to be undergoing a punishment for having a child out of wedlock. Her biggest on-going fear is that someone will discover her daughter is illegitimate. The entire situation she finds herself in is the result of her affair with a married man. Her mother does not support her. The good friend she stayed with, practically in hiding, while she was pregnant and during the first few years of Bunny's life, offered to adopt the child once she married because it was the only way Bunny could have a normal life. That Blanche insisted on raising Bunny herself seems to have led to her kidnapping.I think a clue to what the reader is supposed to take away and to what makes this a feminist novel can be found in the title. A real or imagined child is missing. Her mother has to prove she exists in order to find her. In a larger sense, Bunny is missing from the realm of acceptable children. Her mother must prove she has a right to legitimately exists--something the other mothers at the day care center do not have to do. Bunny's illegitamacy and the way this keeps her outside of the realm of 'normal' children is tied up in her abduction and in her mother's search for her. By the end of the novel finding Bunny Lake, proving she exists, will prove she has a right to exists as well.There really is much more to these pulp fiction stories than meets first meets the eye.
    • 5/5
      I gave my sister a copy of Bunny Lake is Missing because she liked the movie. (I've seen only the last half-hour or so.) It took her months to get around to reading it because she figured she already knew what happened. She told me that she figured the first difference, changing the setting from New York City to London, made sense because the film was British. As she read on, she discovered there were far greater differences, so many that having seen the film was no help at all in figuring out the novel. She said I could borrow it.I read only the first 19 pages when I picked it up. The next day, though, I read what was left in one go. My sister smugly asked, Couldn't put it down, could you? (Nod.)If you believe that there really is a three-year-old Bunny Lake, and that's cleverly left open to question, what Blanche goes through is horrifying. Her explanations are reasonable, but still raise suspicions in her listeners. In case you were born/grew up after the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s to 1980s, being an unwed mother was once considered very shameful. It's why the word 'bastard,' in its original sense of a person whose parents weren't married to each other, was such an insult. Blanche's mother seems unreasonable today, but she could have been worse. Mrs. Lake could have followed the custom of casting her daughter out of the family instead of joining her in exile in New York. Bunny's grandmother isn't available to corroborate Bunny's existence. Blanche refuses to give her old address. Is it because of something her mother did, or because there is no Bunny?Another, older, child goes missing and that boy's mother is just as frantic as Blanche. If you wonder why she felt she had to do what she does to prove that she's a decent woman, it makes sense if you read chapter 22, verses 23-24 of the Biblical book of Deuteronomy. (Verse 29 is even worse because that really was the best the poor girl could hope for back then. Thank God times have changed!)Speaking of changed times, the scene involving a doll hospital owner made me wish Blanche were living when women can learn how to fight. If she were, though, she wouldn't have felt the need to leave her hometown. Still, she's not helpless, as more than one of the persons who think she's insane will learn. By the way, the mask that Dr. Newhouse thinks about when he sees Blanche's lips, is L'Inconnue de la Seine. If you've taken a CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] course, you know her face as Rescue/Resusci/CPT Annie/Anne. The open-mouthed version of the manikin isn't as lovely as the original death mask, so I would suggest looking it up online.Bottom line: when it comes to figuring out what's going on, it doesn't matter if you read the book or watch the film first.
    • 5/5
      Blanche Lake is not like the other mothers who come to collect their children at the local nursery school on New York's Upper East Side. She lives alone, has a job, and has never been married. It's the first day of school when this story begins, and Blanche is eager to see how her daughter, Bunny, has fared away from home. But her expectant waiting becomes a mother's most dreaded nightmare: Bunny never materializes. Neither teachers nor students recall the small girl, and soon Blanche is engaged in a frantic search for any trace of her missing daughter. And the worst part is . . . no one believes her.

    Book preview

    Bunny Lake Is Missing - Evelyn Piper

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