Jawbone (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Dark academy meets existential horror in this scintillating and unsettling novel of friendship, adolescence, and "inquietude." When a group of friends find an abandoned building, their most charismatic member slowly escalates their afternoons of scary stories and dares into a secret society of dangerous rituals and potentially deadly consequences. The characters are entrancing, the ideas are insightful, and the prose itself is thrilling.
Josh
— From JawboneFebruary 2022 Indie Next List
“When a group of friends find an abandoned building, their afternoons escalate from scary stories and dares into dangerous rituals and grave consequences. An unsettling novel of friendship, adolescence, and inquietude.”
— Josh Cook, Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA
Description
Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Translated Literature
"Was desire something like being possessed by a nightmare?"
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 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.