Jawbone by Monica Ojeda

I'll try to explain it better: for me, the fear of the white age came on as my body was changing. First a rancid smell. Then nipples that rose up like hematomas, painful to the touch. Then the vaginal discharge, like fresh, whitish snot. The wiry hair. The stretch marks. The blood. That incompleteness and indefinition that disgusts about us is just as repulsive to me. Childhood ends with the creation of a monster that crawls around at night: an unpleasant body that cannot be trained. Puberty makes us werewolves, or hyenas, or reptiles, and when the moon is full, we can see how we lose ourselves (whatever it is that we are).

Fernanda, a young Ecuadorian teenager, wakes up to find herself chained to a wall. Her captor is her English teacher, Miss Clara. Miss Clara hunts and butchers a rabbit in front of Fernanda, who begins to fear that she is the next on the butcher's block. How did she end up here? A missing third explains it: Annelise, Fernanda's former best friend, who has convinced the Miss Clara that Fernanda has been hurting her, and that Miss Clara--already unstable from the death of her tyrannical mother and a previous experience being tied up by a pair of resentful high school girls--is the next victim.

Annelise, it turns out, is a skilled storyteller. She and her "group," including Fernanda and a trio of other girls, have been gathering for years at an abandoned building to tell spooky stories for years. Annelise is inspired by the "creepypastas" she reads on the internet--you know, Slenderman stuff. Such stories seem juvenile and silly, but in Annelise's hands they become truly frightening; she has spun an entire mythos about a "white age" controlled by a destroying "White God" whose symbols are the white alligator in the swamp and the disembodied jawbone that Annelise wears like a crown. These stories can only be told inside a windowless room painted, of course, white. But Annelise isn't just a storyteller; she yearns for the destruction embodied in the stories to become true, compelling Fernanda into quasi-sexual sessions of biting and choking. It' the bruises and scars from such sessions that allow Annelise to convince Miss Clara that her former best friend is a danger.

Jawbone is one of those rare masterpieces: a book that really shouldn't work at all, but succeeds in spite of that--or perhaps, because of its sheer bravado. You might think it would be cringe-inducing to write a book about creepypastas, but Ojeda reminds us--as Annelise reminds Miss Clara--that two young girls in the U.S. really did kill a classmate because they believed Slenderman demanded it. Jawbone really ought to feel like it's doing too much: throwing in not only the captivity narrative but Fernanda's conversations with her therapist, as well as an essay Annelise writes for Miss Clara that basically lays out the themes of the novel. Miss Clara's previous kidnapping ought to seem like too gratuitous a detail, not to mention the mysterious years-ago death of Fernanda's little brother. But, ultimately, these details contribute to the sense that Jawbone is audacious and unreserved, like the best horror books and movies. (Annelise insists that there is a difference between writing about horror and writing horror, but Jawbone is a testament to the way that horror can bleed through the margins we set for it.)

For Annelise, the White God and the white age are representations of the fundamental horror of living, and especially living as a woman. The white age encompasses the horribly bodily changes of puberty (see the quoted paragraph at top) but also the frightening cycle of creation and destruction that are motherhood and daughterhood. Annelise's group are spoiled upper-class Ecuadorian girls who have come to resent their mothers, who fear them; Miss Clara is so tortured by her mother's resentment that she dons her mother's clothes after her death and tries to become her. I was also fascinated by Jawbone's depiction of teaching: Miss Clara, perhaps because her students are kinds of surrogate daughters to her, is deeply and physically afraid of her students. So it is, by the tortured logic of horror, that by torturing Fernanda, Miss Clara revenges herself on her mother--and herself. The end of the book, though its final violence is only implied and not depicted, is one of the most unsettling conclusions to anything I think I've ever read.