What does it mean when horror becomes self-aware? Mónica Ojeda’s 2017 novel Jawbone, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, is sometimes a meditation on horror storytelling in all of its forms and sometimes a full-blown example of it. This is a novel that incorporates plenty of genre tropes — its opening chapter centers around the aftermath of a kidnapping — but it’s also a novel that embraces allusions to stories ranging from creepy pasta to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s queer vampire tale Carmilla.
All of which is to say: it’s a lot. Some examples of meta-horror — from Nick Mamatas’s novel I Am Providence to the film Cabin in the Woods — run tropes through their paces to critique them or elude reader or audience expectations. For Ojeda, the allusions to horror as a genre are just part of the pop culture-savvy milieu in which her young characters are immersed. The opening paragraph contains references to animated cartoons, Wonder Woman, and the model and actress Twiggy — Ojeda’s way of letting the reader know what to expect in terms of wide-ranging pop culture touchstones.
Jawbone is often dreamlike, sometimes reminiscent of Sara Mesa’s Four by Four in its evocation of the Gothic in a modern setting, at other times reminding me of Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines in its smashing together horror tropes and characters who are all too familiar with the tropes in question. At the heart of Jawbone is a group of what an omniscient narrator describes as “elite students at an Opus Dei school,” the Delta Bilingual Academy, as well as their teacher, Miss Clara — who, we learn in the opening chapter, has kidnapped Fernanda, one of the students in question. From there, the timeframe bifurcates, showing both the events leading up to the kidnapping — focusing on Fernanda’s friendship with another student, Annelise — and answering the question of whether or not Fernanda will get out of her predicament.
What that amounts to on a structural level isn’t quite as basic as juxtaposing two timeframes. Occasionally, transcripts of therapy sessions enter the mix; sometimes, certain sentences or paragraphs are aligned differently than the rest of the page, adding to the overall mood of delirium. Jawbone is a book fixated on rituals — at one point, early in the book, Annelise describes her idea of God as “a hysterical wandering womb.”
“Anne’s imagination is realer than you or my parents or even me,” Fernanda tells her therapist in one scene. She goes on to describe Annelise’s stories as having a life of their own, which leads to some of the novel’s most unsettling language:
“Anyway, I don’t know if I feel safe now. I think it’s because Anne’s imagination is still working in my head, even though I don’t want it to. It’s like a tooth — not in my ear, but in my brain. My brain is teething, and it hurts.”
This reads like an unsettling echo of a moment much earlier in the novel, when Clara is described as trying to deal with “the unwanted thoughts that — like cockroaches — laid eggs inside her head.”
In the aforementioned conversation with her therapist, Fernanda goes on to talk about Annelise’s theories of the White God — one of two deities that comes up here — and Annelise’s hopes that she could create an online viral moment for that cosmology akin to Slenderman.
“‘Why is the White God white?’ Natalia asked right before telling her own horror story. ‘Because white is the perfect silence,’ Annelise responded with apparent solemnity. ‘And God is the horrible silence of everything.’”
As for Clara, the full depths of her obsessions come to the forefront gradually. “Clara knew she had tied up her mother’s neck with her umbilical love,” Ojeda writes. “Now she tied up Fernanda, because a good teacher is a mother, and a student is a daughter.” And if your initial reaction to this is somewhat along the lines of Wait, that’s not at all correct — you have a sense of the bizarre rationale Clara and the other characters have concocted for their actions. But the sense of cyclical behavior and rituals — whether born of the internet or born from religious tradition — is ever-present.
That it’s also modern seems to be — as the saying goes — a feature rather than a bug. In an interview earlier this year published by the journal Asymptote, Ojeda spoke about the importance of ritual in her work. “In the Andean world in Latin America, a shaman can be playing chess on [a] Looney Toons themed chessboard; it’s something I’ve witnessed,” Ojeda said. “A while back, I actually saw a shaman making a limpia — a ritual — and he was mixing the herbs in a Coca Cola can. That’s how it works right now, and it’s very interesting because it forges new legends, new oral stories, and transforms these symbols.”
All of which makes for an interesting context regarding the allusions to both the White God and another entity referred to as the drag-queen God in Jawbone. But that sense of ritual extends throughout the novel, and helps to explain some of the ways that images and actions seem somewhat mirrored — the talk of thoughts infecting a mind like parasites, or the constant references to teeth throughout the text — which sometimes take on a ritualistic element of their own, as in this scene between Annelise and Fernanda from late in the novel:
“‘Mark me,’ Annelise commands in the shower. ‘Make me bleed with your thirty-two teeth.’ And thirty-two times, she bites her. Thirty-two times, her tongue runs down her legs and salivates the stars red. In the water, they look at the colors of the bites: black, green, blue, violet. Yawning cosmos on her skin. Rosettes in the Milky Way of her flesh.”
Jawbone is a novel that wrestles with the tension between the physical and the aesthetic in a host of ways. That includes the aforementioned image of ideas as invasive parasites, but it also relates to an especially bravura sequence late in the novel, presented as a paper Annelise has written for Clara’s class. The assignment involves reacting to an Edgar Allan Poe short story, but Annelise quickly dispels the idea that she’ll do that. “Dear Miss Clara,” she writes. “I’m not going to write about Poe.” Instead, she explains, she plans to write about “the experience of fear and about white horror specifically.”
The closest comparison that comes to mind would have been if Thomas Ligotti had inserted a pared-down version of his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race within one of his tales of cosmic horror. Annelise’s discussion of horror morphs from a haunting found document to an example of literary criticism all its own; essentially, it feels like Ojeda offering readers one prism by which they can look at the work they’re in the process of reading. Although even that might not entirely work as an explanation, as Annelise herself seems bound and determined to push back against the idea of interpreting this too meticulously:
“Maybe you’ll find this disappointing, Miss Clara, but I just want to be honest: we turned to literature because we wanted to really scare ourselves; not for the love of the art or any of the other reasons you talk about in class. And books (well, some) are really scary. I think it’s that nothing recounted in them can be seen, only imagined.”
It’s worth considering, too, the ways in which Ojeda leaves certain parts of this narrative blank — including the questions being posed to some of the characters in the found documents that punctuate the narrative. 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.
[Published by Coffee House Press on February 8, 2022, 272 pages, $16.95 paperback]