44 pages • 1 hour read
Deborah Howe, James HoweBunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Music in the Night”
Harold explains that Chester is “not your ordinary cat” to justify his friend’s actions and thoughts (17). Chester is Mr. Monroe’s cat. Mr. Monroe is an English professor, which means that Chester grew up surrounded by books. He has a voracious reading appetite, and his favorite stories are horror and mystery. On the night Bunnicula arrived, Chester fell asleep reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe. He woke up in the middle of night to an “eerie stillness” and felt an urge to check on Bunnicula. That’s when he noticed that Bunnicula’s fur looks “more like a cape than a coat” (19). Chester swore he heard strange gypsy music outside, and he thought he saw fangs in Bunnicula’s mouth instead of rabbit teeth. Harold doesn’t know what to do with Chester’s story.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Some Unusual Goings-On”
Chester stays up all night to keep an eye on Bunnicula, which means he sleeps all day. This leaves Harold with no one to talk to during daytime, and this makes him lonely, especially since Toby and Pete are more concerned with the new bunny than him. One morning, Chester confides in Harold. He says that Bunnicula escaped from his cage last night, but Harold thinks this is impossible. Chester isn’t sure how it happened, since he admittedly fell asleep, but when he woke up, he saw Bunnicula leaving the kitchen.
Mr. Monroe is concerned after opening the refrigerator to find a white tomato that’s been drained of its color. The Monroe family debates the cause of the strange sight, but Chester believes this proves his theory about Bunnicula being a true vampire because the tomato has teeth marks on it. Chester tells Harold to meet him at night when the family is asleep so he can prove he’s telling the truth.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Harold provides Chester’s background in Chapter 2 to explain why the cat immediately concludes that Bunnicula is a vampire. Before meeting Bunnicula, Chester’s imagination was already fueled by mysterious tales of horror. When the strange little bunny suddenly appears in the Monroe household, it doesn’t take much for Chester to theorize that Bunnicula’s unusual fur pattern and teeth are signs of his vampiric identity. Unlike Chester, Harold doesn’t initially assume anything strange about Bunnicula, and he remains skeptical despite Chester’s efforts to convince him otherwise.
Chapter 3 is the first time that Chester’s theory is supported by evidence. Before this chapter, Chester’s idea that Bunnicula is a vampire was propagated by his own imaginative observations. Harold didn’t necessarily agree with these observations, which made it difficult to discern whether Chester’s theory was correct or if he was just imagining it all. But in Chapter 3 the Monroe family finds the white tomato, and Chester believes this evidence proves his theory since the tomato has fang marks on it. In his opinion, it’s clear that Bunnicula used his fangs to suck the tomato dry. Although Harold still doesn’t fully agree with Chester’s theory, he starts to partially believe his paranoid friend.
