Mónica Ojeda
trans. Sarah Booker
Jawbone
Fernanda and Annelise are so close they are practically sisters: a double image, inseparable. So how does Fernanda end up bound on the floor of a deserted cabin, held hostage by one of her teachers and estranged from Annelise?
When Fernanda, Annelise, and their friends from the Delta Bilingual Academy convene after school, Annelise leads them in thrilling but increasingly dangerous rituals to a rhinestoned, Dior-scented, drag-queen god of her own invention. Even more perilous is the secret Annelise and Fernanda share, rooted in a dare in which violence meets love. Meanwhile, their literature teacher Miss Clara, who is obsessed with imitating her dead mother, struggles to preserve her deteriorating sanity. Each day she edges nearer to a total break with reality.
Interweaving pop culture references and horror concepts drawn from Herman Melville, H. P. Lovecraft, and anonymous ‘creepypastas’, Jawbone is an ominous, multivocal novel that explores the terror inherent in the pure potentiality of adolescence and the fine line between desire and fear.
Coming October 2022.
“Strange, twisted... Ojeda, who was named one of Granta’s best young Spanish-language novelists, writes with a polyphonic verve, agilely translated by Booker. Her language, like adolescence itself, is unruly and excessive, full of dramatic shifts and capable of both beauty and horror.”
“Expertly digs from the darkness, true horror and terrible power of being an adolescent. I was mesmerised throughout.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador, 1988) is the author of the novels La desfiguración Silva (Premio Alba Narrativa, 2014), Nefando (Candaya, 2016), and Mandíbula (Candaya, 2018), as well as the poetry collections El ciclo de las piedras (Rastro de la Iguana, 2015) and Historia de la leche (Candaya, 2020). Her stories have been published in the anthology Emergencias: Doce cuentos iberoamericanos (Candaya, 2014) and the collections Caninos (Editorial Turbina, 2017) and Las voladoras (Páginas de Espuma, 2020). In 2017, she was included on the Bógota39 list of the best thirty-nine Latin American writers under forty, and in 2019, she received the Prince Claus Next Generation Award in honour of her outstanding literary achievements.
Sarah Booker (North Carolina, 1989) is a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a focus on contemporary Latin American narrative and translation studies. She is a literary translator working from Spanish to English and has translated, among others, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest (Feminist Press, 2017; And Other Stories, 2018) and Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020) and Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone (Coffee House Press, 2021). Her translations have also been published in journals such as the Paris Review, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, 3:am magazine, Nashville Review, MAKE, and Translation Review.