Carlton Mellick III, the godfather of Bizarro Fiction, is back with a tribute to the unintentionally terrifying children's commercials of the The '70s and '80s.
Only Petey remembers the Fruit Fun cereal commercials of the 1980s. He remembers how warped and disturbing they were. He remembers the lumpy-shaped cartoon children sitting around a breakfast table, eating puffy pink cereal brought to them by the distortedly animated mascot, Berry Bunny. The characters were creepier than the Sesame Street Humpty Dumpty, freakier than Mr. Noseybonk from the old BBC show Jigsaw. They used to give him nightmares as a child. Nightmares where Berry Bunny would reach out of the television and grab him, pulling him into her cereal bowl to be eaten by the demented cartoon children.
When Petey brings up Fruit Fun to his friends, none of them have any idea what he's talking about. They've never heard of the cereal or seen the commercials before. And they're not the only ones. Nobody has ever heard of it. There's not even any information about Fruit Fun on Google or Wikipedia. At first, Petey thinks he's going crazy. He wonders if all of those commercials were real or just false memories. But then he starts seeing them again. Berry Bunny appears on his television, promoting Fruit Fun cereal in her squeaky unsettling voice. And the next thing Petey knows, he and his friends are sucked into the cereal commercial and forced to survive in a surreal world populated by cartoon characters made flesh.
From the cult author of Cuddly Holocaust, The Cannibals of Candyland, and I Knocked Up Satan's Daughter, comes an absurd horror tale that pulls you in and never lets go.
This work provides examples of:
- Adorable Abomination: From the perspective of the television, Berry Bunny and the kids in the commercial look just like any cartoon from the era it came from. Should you wind up trapped in the pocket dimension it takes place, their unnatural proportions come across as gruesome and horrifying. The children do absolutely nothing but eat cereal at the table, acting out the commercial on repeat and ignoring anything outside of their scripted segments.
- Cosmic Horror Story: All we find out about the producers of the commercial comes from Dave's ravings after being attacked by them, and from the sound of it they're incomprehensibly alien.
- Dying as Yourself: When Peri manages to kill Berry Bunny by ripping her throat out, Berry Bunny manages to utter out a "thank you" before dying.
- Me's a Crowd: Berry Bunny can turn people into a myriad tiny copies of themselves. The mind of the original person is intact and controls all the tiny bodies as a hive mind.
- Mistaken for Gay: Because Petey was raised by two fathers, both of whom are German immigrants with prominent gay lisps, he grew up with a similar lisp and thus assumed to be gay despite only being interested in women.
- Monster Is a Mommy: Defied. Peri/Peary Bunny claims to still be pregnant, but Petey sees no sign of it even after a long time passes, and thinks that the transformation probably caused her to miscarry.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Dave is caught by one of the shadowy masses lurking outside of the commercial dimension neighborhoods. It is not shown necessarily what attacks him, but screams and tearing can be heard and by the time it is done with Davy, he his covered in massive tears and lacerations, babbling that the commercials aren't for children or for Petey and his friends, but for "them."
- Real After All: While it was thought that Petey merely hallucinated the Fruit Fun cereal, his dads realize just how horrifyingly real the commercials that scared their son where when Dad-T finds his son being dragged halfway through the television. Petey realizes that he was not hallucinating when the commercial comes on during his gaming session with Dave and Dave could see it too.
- Trapped in TV Land: The Fruit Fun cereal commercials are revealed to be a pocket dimension that Berry Bunny is able to trap people in by dragging them through the tv.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Deconstructed. Dave and Petey claim to be friends that just like messing with each other, but deep down they actually really do deeply despise each other.
- Was Once a Man: Implied with Berry Bunny. Definitely the case with Peary Bunny, who was once Peri.
- Would Hurt a Child: Berry Bunny seems to prefer targeting children, Petey first encountering her when he was a child. While she targets Petey while he is in college when he remembers her (and takes his college friends with them incidentally), this seems to be a case of The One That Got Away, every other victim of Berry's actions ( and later Peary's) being children.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: After Peri kills Berry Bunny, she and Petey are trapped inside of the commercial dimension. Peri accidentally turns Petey into the human cereal fragments. Over time she becomes more and more like Berry Bunny - renaming herself "Peary Bunny" - and winds up eating Petey before her mind becomes completely like Berry, kidnapping people and turning them into cereal out of whatever unholy purpose the commercials possess.
