4 ideas
Fernanda had belonged to a closed circle of schoolgirls, led by her intense best friend Annelise, who gathered in an abandoned building to read creepypasta and perform escalating 'tests' of fear devoted to an invented deity, the White God. The novel moves between Fernanda's captivity and a reconstruction of what the girls did to one another and to Clara, showing adolescent play and adult breakdown feeding each other.
The girls do not simply suffer fear; they pursue it deliberately, because deliberate terror delivers an intensity and closeness that ordinary life under strict religious and class discipline denies them. Sharing the scare becomes proof of loyalty and a form of desire, so each ritual must escalate to keep producing the same thrill. This escalation is what turns a game into real violence.
The novel treats maternal and quasi-maternal bonds as mouths that nourish and consume at once: the jawbone is the organ of both speech and biting. Clara's dread of her own mother and her compulsion to imitate her show that a daughter can be swallowed into a parent's identity. Clara then replicates the bond, in its predatory form, with her student.
Anonymous internet horror stories give the girls an open-source mythology that they can extend, dramatize, and eventually treat as scripture, as when Annelise builds the White God out of it. Because no author owns the tales and each retelling adds detail, the fiction becomes a shared reality that licenses real acts. Such a story is an engine for behavior, not just something consumed.