When the Narrator Is a Very Good Boy

The first animal narrator to make an impression on me was an amiable mutt named Harold, who, with remarkable lucidity, recounts the peculiar events of James and Deborah Howes’s 1979 novel, Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery. The book, written for and beloved by children, boasts a winning premise by any metric: A fanged rabbit’s benign vampiric qualities inspire a series of animal hijinks that endanger Bunnicula and propel Harold to acts of interspecies mercy. Interrogations into rabbit…