11/01/2021

In Ecuadorian writer Ojeda’s delectable English-language debut, two classmates bond at an all-girls’ Catholic high school over a made-up mythology. The ever-inventive Annelise designs a deity (“a rhinestone-encrusted firefly”) to entertain her group of friends, among them Fernanda. The two become inseparable and then fall dangerously in love, as Ojeda plays with the narrative device of the double—one of several tropes from the “creepypastas” of internet-horror culture. Their literature teacher, Clara Lopez Valverde, embodies her own horror story: she’s haunted by the ghost of her mother and descends into madness. A lifelong sufferer of an extreme anxiety disorder—“a panic attack is like waking up burning in water, falling upward, freezing in a fire, walking against yourself, your flesh solid and your bones liquid”—Clara will end up kidnapping one of her students for her own occult reason. There are echoes of Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson at play, but the vision is ultimately Ojeda’s own—delicious in how it seduces and disturbs the reader as the girls rely on horror both as entertainment and as a way of staving off the actual terrors of growing up. This is creepy good fun. (Feb.)

Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize
The New York Times, “New Books in Translation”
The A.V. Club, “Books to Read in February”
Words Without Borders, “Most Anticipated”
February Indie Next List
LitReactor, “2022 Horror You Do Not Want to Miss”
Ms. Magazine, “Favorite Books of 2022”
Latinx in Publishing, “Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books”
Riffraff Bookstore, “Favorites of 2022”

“This bodily, propulsive narrative re-envisions mainstays of the Latin American novel for a 21st-century feminist sensibility based in Internet creepypastas, true crime, and women’s autonomy. Expertly characterizing her protagonists while providing an engrossing, compelling story, Mónica Ojeda has hewn out her own version of contemporary gothic set in Ecuadorian culture. Sarah Booker’s fluid translation admirably attends to the book’s many complicated voices, situations, and registers.” —Judges’ Citation, 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature

“Six girls in a private Catholic high school in Ecuador turn to the occult in Mónica Ojeda’s macabre English-language debut novel, Jawbone. The girls’ ringleader, Annelise, entertains her friends with tales of a made-up deity and eggs them on with strange dares. Soon enough, she and her friend Fernanda are falling in love, raising the stakes of Annelise’s fabricated creepypasta. Ojeda has drawn comparisons to Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, and Edgar Allen Poe.” —The A.V. Club

“Jawbone depicts the process of becoming a woman as the ultimate horror story. . . . With terrifying ease, Ojeda illustrates how womanhood is characterized by dualities: fearful and feared, desired and desiring.” —Morgan Graham, Chicago Review of Books

“Rife with gothic body horror and the darkness of the jungle and within ourselves. . . . Ojeda is a strikingly singular voice, combining basic teen angst with stark madness and the power of teen girls to push back in a world that tries to make them powerless.” —Yvonne C. Garrett, The Brooklyn Rail

“Delectable. . . . There are echoes of Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson at play, but the vision is ultimately Ojeda’s own—delicious in how it seduces and disturbs the reader as the girls rely on horror both as entertainment and as a way of staving off the actual terrors of growing up. This is creepy good fun.” —Publishers Weekly

“Edgar Allan Poe meets a few of the mean girls. . . . Mother-daughter relationships slide under Ojeda’s microscope, sharing space with the teacher-student dynamic and deities as objects in an exploration of power and sexuality during adolescence. . . . Every good horror story needs a victim; Ojeda’s monsters and victims wear the same faces.” —Kirkus

“Jawbone distinguishes itself through fevered brilliance. . . . Like the strange bloom of a corpse flower, the novel evokes life, death, and a vortex of twisted beauty.” —Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews, starred review

“A wild, dirty, surreal, creepy narrative. . . . This novel, which explores the interstices between genres, shows what can happen when a writer digs deep into language while looking for darkness, for the unexplainable, for blood. . . . A dynamic, engrossing reading experience.” —Gabino Iglesias, Southwest Review

“Mónica Ojeda is one of the most powerful and provocative voices in Latin American literature today. Her influences span from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King’s Carrie, to anonymous internet horror legends called ‘creepypastas.’ In her novel Jawbone, Ojeda explores the darkest aspects of women’s relationships in the suffocating atmosphere of an Opus Dei school for girls in Ecuador. In her multivocal and lyrical prose, Ojeda demonstrates the pernicious ways that violence against women can be exercised and reveals how victims can be transformed into perpetrators.” —Rose Bialer, Asymptote

“Sometimes a meditation on horror storytelling in all of its forms and sometimes a full-blown example of it. . . . Annelise (and, by proxy, Ojeda) are onto something about the primal appeal of horror literature; what Ojeda seems to be doing here, in part, is pushing that theory to its limits, and learning just how unsettling that can be.” —Tobias Carroll, On the Seawall

“It might be the most harrowing novel I’ve read in a decade. . . . As an example of top-grade horror (and frankly top-grade literature), there’s very little that will be published this year, or any year, that will surpass this devastating novel.” —Ian Mond, Locus

“Hits the sweet spot of novels under 300 pages. . . . And we always need more translated horror.” —Sadie Hartmann, LitReactor

“The horror exists in, and is generated by, a delicious but unsettling uncertainty of self and non-self whereupon realities are created and cast off. . . . Ojeda’s poetic craft shines through Jawbone’s prose. It’s a deeply visual book in which seemingly transparent images introduced early on are lacquered over with layers of meaning as the story progresses, building a patina of dread.” —Annabella Farmer, Santa Fe Reporter

“Dark academy meets existential horror in this scintillating and unsettling novel of friendship, adolescence, and ‘inquietude.’ When a group of friends find an abandoned building, their most charismatic member slowly escalates their afternoons of scary stories and dares into a secret society of dangerous rituals and potentially deadly consequences. The characters are entrancing, the ideas are insightful, and the prose itself is thrilling.” —Josh Cook, Porter Square Books

“Mónica Ojeda is fearless in her approach to both themes and style. She deals with horror and desire like few others, with a beauty so extreme that it sometimes leaves you gasping. In Jawbone, an elite Catholic school becomes the stage for nightmares fueled by obsession, creepypastas, and teenagers crazed by hormones and horror movies. But in the end, the novel is about Mónica’s primary concerns: sexuality, violence, and how a story about the damaged and the lost can be told with such beauty and relentlessness. She scares me, and she amazes me, and I think she is one of the most important writers working in Spanish today.” —Mariana Enriquez

“Jawbone is a dark fairy tale in which a group of girls become adults on their own, taking blood oaths with cruelty, torture, and vengeance. This book summons the evil spirits that surround all adolescence, and they’re made to speak straight into our ears. As chilling as it is necessary, like all of Ojeda’s work.” —María Fernanda Ampuero

“Mónica Ojeda has at her disposal the most enviable combination I can imagine, and she has it in spades: a lucid mind, an exacting language, and a wild heart.” —Andrés Barba

2021-11-30
Edgar Allan Poe meets a few of the mean girls.

A Catholic girls' high school for the daughters of elite Ecuadorians provides the seemingly innocuous setting for Ojeda’s meta treatment of the creepypasta phenomenon. Six school friends coalesce into something more resembling a cult under the influence of the charismatic—or just bossy?—Annelise. It is Fernanda who is the most intimately involved with Annelise’s increasingly surreal dares and challenges. Running on a collision course with the girls’ journey into the macabre is Miss Clara, the school’s anxiety-ridden new literature teacher. Miss Clara survived a lifetime of maternal domination only to have become, at a prior teaching position, the humiliated hostage of two girl students. Repeated references to teeth, jawbones, blood, and being devoured reinforce the menacing tone Ojeda sets from the opening scene of Miss Clara’s own abduction of Fernanda. Ojeda’s slow reveal of who did what to whom (and, maybe, why) follows a twisting course using transcripts of Fernanda’s dialogues with a therapist and passages which echo the increasing dissolution of Miss Clara’s already tenuous grip on composure. Mother-daughter relationships slide under Ojeda’s microscope, sharing space with the teacher-student dynamic and deities as objects in an exploration of power and sexuality during adolescence. Room is left for ambivalence about the true nature of horror; in a realistic change of pace, Ojeda’s monsters are, themselves, afraid of things. (The real monsters at work, though, are of a domestic kind.) An extensive translator’s note helps place the creepypasta genre in context in the literary landscape of terror, horror, and suspense and explains the stylistic language choices favored by Ojeda.

Every good horror story needs a victim; Ojeda’s monsters and victims wear the same faces.