... rife with gothic body horror and the darkness of the jungle and within ourselves ... This is not just a tale of young female friendship gone too far, it’s a warning about the dangers of allowing desires to grow uncontrolled and unquestioned, of ceding one’s self to another’s dark impulses ... there are real forces at work in the novel as well—it’s not all just horror stories and scary games, abandoned buildings and encroaching forest ... Although critics reference Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson, 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.
... reveals the razor-thin line between fear and desire, and the horror of becoming a woman ... 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. The line between them is so thin there is hardly a difference. Women’s potential for duality makes us powerful, but it is also the reason that we have to live in fear.
Despite the familiar undergirding of its privileged, manipulative school girls, Jawbone distinguishes itself through fevered brilliance. Clara’s struggles stand in vulnerable, vengeful contrast to the girl’s behavior. Like the strange bloom of a corpse flower, the novel Jawbone evokes life, death, and a vortex of twisted beauty.
... 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.
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.
