Jawbone

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.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.