Killer Rabbit / Literature

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• Bunnicula has a vampire-like rabbit that Chester assumes is a killer rabbit, but there's no evidence that he ever actually does any harm whatsoever besides draining vegetables. Another author reimagined Bunnicula as an Evil Overlord which is pretty charming.
• Codex Alera: The young cubs of the Canim are described as looking like adorable little puppies with opposable thumbs. They can also tear someone's hand off with just their fangs at only five years old, and also do so with enough force to dislocate someone's shoulder.
• Dark Lord of Derkholm: One of Derk's experiments resulted in a flock of carnivorous sheep. This was apparently an accident, but it comes in handy when his children need to keep an army of dangerous criminals in line.
• Dragaera: Norska are omnivorous rabbits that eat dragons.
• Kierkegaard in Dragomir's Diary is a penguin wearing a top hat. Fantastic. Get to know him, though, and you discover that he's surprisingly adept at murdering things with his small trident, and may have the ability to transform into something far less cutesy.
• The Edge Chronicles: The Deepwoods are full of all manner of horrific animals and plants, but the effectively undisputed top of the foodchain are wig-wigs. These are small, orange fluffballs that also happen to be pack hunters that can and will kill anything they can reach, no matter how big or strong it is. Their only real weakness is their inability to climb.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar anthology Seasons, the short story A Midnight Clear features the village of Kettleford and its beloved guardians, giant talking Friendly Neighborhood Spiders. The primary spider and most of her spiderlings hibernate for the winter, but Harmony and Rhapsody prefer to stay awake, so the villagers have knit them sweaters and booties and connected their attics with passageways the village cats also appreciate, to make the cold easier on them. Quite some ink is spilled on how cute and sweet they are, fully integrated into Kettleford life, but then bandits show up. The lamb-sized spiderlings eagerly leap on the bandits and envenomate them, killing them horribly and eating their liquiefied innards. Vanyel Ashkevron, visiting and having probably the best Midwinter of his life, is quite dismayed to find that the cuddly childlike spiderlings are willing to eat people, but the villagers wave away his concern and help their guardians stash the remaining bodies so Harmony and Rhapsody can eat the others later.
  “They’re adorable. And they can go from adorable to bloodthirsty killer in the blink of an eye.”
• This is a HFY thread that describes humans as a race of Killer Rabbits, and the galaxy knows it. It's even lampshaded multiple times. Basically, humanity goes out into the stars and the galaxy goes "Aw, they're adorable". This trope also gets deconstructed in that humanity, while very clearly taking offense to this reaction, the general reaction is to swallow their pride and shamelessly put both the "Killer" and "Rabbit" parts to good use.
• Hometown: One of the Heart Eater's primary servants is a coydog puppy. It has no more physical strength than any other puppy, but then, considering that it can Force-Choke a full-grown German Shepherd, it doesn't really need physical strength.
• Honor Harrington: Treecats are cute, fluffy, six-limbed felinoids who are great with children, wonderful, supportive companions for life who'll be with you through thick and thin... and will turn into fuzzy, flying buzz saws if they think you're a threat to their kittens or adopted humans. Treecats think that enemies come in only two states: those that have been properly dealt with, and those that are still alive.
• The Hunger Games: There are carnivorous squirrels, poisonous butterflies, killer monkeys, and much much more.
• InCryptid: On their own, an Aeslin mouse is almost as vulnerable as an ordinary mouse, though they do make and use weapons. In a group, they've been known to take down large snakes, venomous gila monsters, and even alligators.
• The Jungle Book: Rikki Tikki Tavi is a mongoose, but when facing off against deadly snakes, he comes off as a cute furry fellow who is The Hero.
• Moreau Series: Angel Lopez is literally one, being an uplifted anthropomorphic rabbit. She led a gang of rabbits in Cleveland, and kicks a significant amount of ass on her own in the third book.
• Oryx and Crake: Wolvogs look like friendly dogs and, when they are not ruthlessly killing other creatures, they act like friendly dogs. They can go from friendly to homicidal, and back, quickly.
• Quite literally in "No Need for a Core??", in the form of Dire Rabbits. Sharp-horned rabbits to pierce, blunt-horned rabbits for bludgeoning damage, and rabbits with extra long and sharp teeth. And that's before we get into the ones that have breath weapons. Or the three-foot tall laganthro clans. Or the giant Void Bunny.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Polyphemus' island is home to a flock of carnivorous, hippopotamus-sized sheep that can devour a deer in less than a minute, leaving only a pile of bones. Percy describes them as "piranhas with wool".
• The Perfect Run: Ryan has a rabbit plushie stuffed with more weapons than anyone knows what to do with. Everyone is surprised and impressed when they realize what it is, but Ryan absolutely refuses to let anyone else touch it, repeatedly thinking of it as too powerful to use outside of Suicide Runs. Turns out it's possessed by a spirit from the Violet world. When Ryan turns it on, it will use all those weapons to perfect and imaginative effect, until it finds a child and starts duplicating. Ryan considers any timeline where he had to use the plushie to be a lost cause by default.
• The Plague Star features creatures called "hellkittens", which spit wads of powerfully acidic saliva.
• Rainbows End: Mr. Rabbit qualifies as "the next bad thing" in the eyes of one character. The previous "bad thing" was a plague worse than bubonic, and the one before that was the nuclear destruction of Chicago. It's never made clear how much rabbit-nature he actually has.
• Redwall: Woodland creatures like hares, mice, otters, squirrels, hedgehogs, and even moles are all quite capable of becoming fierce warriors and defeating any vermin that threaten them. (Although a badger isn't exactly in a Killer Rabbit scenario when what it's fighting is a rat.) Basically, it's a World of Funny Animals where the "Funny Animals" are Killer Rabbits. Except the actual rabbits, ironically enough.
• The Scar: The head of Armada's underwater police force is a sadistic dolphin named Bastard John.
• Sixth of the Dusk: The island Patji is home to, among other deadly animals, mice with a single venomous tooth which, of course, can kill you. Unusually enough, they've actually been tamed and are one of the few things on the island not especially dangerous.
• The Starchild Trilogy: In The Reefs of Space, the Planner's daughter, Donna Creery, is attended by a set of "peace doves" — beautiful birds which have been enhanced and trained to serve as deadly bodyguards.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • Ghost-Walker features a race of diminutive fluffy bird people who are mostly ultra peaceful and sweet. Mostly. When one particularly xenophobic one gets nasty, he uses his monstrously powerful telepathy to drive an entire invading force of Klingons to suicide, Mind Rapes and possesses Captain Kirk, and almost destroys the Enterprise before he's convinced to stop.
  • Invasion: Most of the "Furies" resemble demonic creatures (because they're the beings that spawned the legends). A few, however, are fluffy and cute. They're still vicious killers who want their ancestral home back, though.
  • To Storm Heaven: A B-plot involves Alexander (Worf's son) receiving a hamster from Dr. Crusher as a pet. Worf starts off contemptuous of the sleepy little beast, until he mishandles it and gets the hell bitten out of his finger for his trouble. Worf actually respects its Killer Rabbitness and names it a Klingon name that means "Tribble who battles with honor". Alexander prefers the original moniker of "Fido." Of course, hamsters come from Earth, where most everything not obviously dangerous is probably this trope.
• Sten has Doc, an alien who resembles a cuddly koala bear. His species are in fact vicious predators which act cute to lure in prey; Doc is so bloodthirsty that he has to be fitted with a Restraining Bolt in order to interact with his teammates without killing them out of instinct.
• Sword of Truth: In Soul of the Fire, an embodiment of evil either possesses or impersonates a chicken. Strangely, the main characters are capable of realizing this... which means you have two badasses who rule the known freaking world and who can alternately make people her slave or destroy armies with a wave of his hand scared shitless by a goddamn chicken.
  "This was no chicken! This was evil manifest!"
• Tunnel in the Sky: A group of teenagers on a survival-training exercise are stranded on an Earthlike planet when the wormhole they used to get there malfunctions. One local animal is the "Dopey Joe", a stupid, slow-moving cat-sized reptiloid which appears utterly harmless... until the season comes when it, well, swarms.
• The Voyage of Máel Dúin: On one of the unknown islands visited by Mael Duin and his companions, the voyagers discover a mysterious palace inhabited only by a playful kitten. Everything is fine until one of them tries to take one of the precious necklaces from the piles of treasure lying around; which is when the kitten jumps at him and burns him into a heap of ashes. Then it goes right back to his play.
• The War Against the Chtorr: The bunnydogs appear to be the only friendly Chtorrans encountered by the humans. Unfortunately they also represent humanity's future in the Chtorran ecology: as passive, contented creatures who are glad to be eaten by higher members of the food chain. There are also meeps. A mother rabbit will reject her own young to nurse meeps, who will then suckle her to death. One character darkly theorizes that the excessively cute bunnydogs are meant to be the equivalent for humans.
• Warrior Cats: Longtail has to retire at a young age because a rabbit he was chasing scratched his eyes and blinded him.
• Watership Down: Gen. Woundwort, who can fight (and beat) many of the beasts that prey on rabbits. As opposed to Bigwig, who is One Badass Rabbit. Also worthy of mention is the Black Rabbit of Inle, the most extreme version of this Trope, since he's basically the Grim Reaper in rabbit-form.
• The Whateley Universe has a toy cabbit owned by Tennyo — which conceals quite a few blades and needles inside itself, and can exert three hundred pounds of force through each (while unerringly passing through gaps in armor) when it's being animated by Jade.
  • Then there's Dragonrider's pet (which she created herself): Pern, a cute little dragon the size of a housecat. If Pern gets really angry, he grows. He can reach a thirty-foot wingspan with claws that can rip through granite.
• White Fang:
  • Partway through, White Fang is thrown into a dog-fighting ring. He kills everything sent at him, even a lynx... until the ring owners bring in a bulldog. A remarkably friendly bulldog named "Cherokee" who at first doesn't attack. It nearly kills him.
  • The weasel that beats up White Fang as a pup is one for sure. The narrator even says that for size and weight the weasel was the most ferocious, vindictive, and terrible of all the killers of the Wild.
• The Year Of The Angry Rabbit: Played for Laughs. The novel involves an attempt by the Australian government to cull its rabbit population using an experimental chemical, which results in giant, man-eating (and plague-spreading) rabbits that eventually overrun the continent.

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