Jawbone

In Ecuadorian writer Ojeda’s delectable English-language debut, two classmates bond at an all-girls’ Catholic high school over a made-up mythology. The ever-inventive Annelise designs a deity (“a rhinestone-encrusted firefly”) to entertain her group of friends, among them Fernanda. The two become inseparable and then fall dangerously in love, as Ojeda plays with the narrative device of the double—one of several tropes from the “creepypastas” of internet-horror culture. Their literature teacher, Clara Lopez Valverde, embodies her own horror story: she’s haunted by the ghost of her mother and descends into madness. A lifelong sufferer of an extreme anxiety disorder—“a panic attack is like waking up burning in water, falling upward, freezing in a fire, walking against yourself, your flesh solid and your bones liquid”—Clara will end up kidnapping one of her students for her own occult reason. 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. (Feb.)