Lockjaw (Matteo L. Cerilli)

Lockjaw
Matteo L. Cerilli
Tundra Books
Fiction, YA Horror
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Bridlington is a quintessential small American town, the sort of place where goodly folks mind their own business and stay out of trouble... and where, too often, the cries of the outcasts are ignored in the name of keeping the peace. When young Chuck Warren, a bullied eleven-year-old boy, died in the old mill one night, Paz Espino saw what happened, but the grown-ups don't believe that she saw a monster in the shadows below the hole in the floor. She's branded a problem child, a troublemaker, and only her three best friends stick by her as the rest of the town turns their backs. But Paz is like a bulldog with jaws locked on a bone; she's determined to find and kill the beast, and if nobody else will help her, then she'll do it herself or die trying.
The young stranger blows into town with a cruddy old car, a mutt named Bird, an envelope of money, and no name. He's looking for a fresh start far away from home, and Bridlington seems as good a place as any. But from the moment he pulls up at the gas station, he gets a sense of hidden secrets and lurking danger, a sense that grows stronger after a strange encounter with a group of kids outside the convenience store. Taking the name Asher, he starts trying to build a new life, making friends with the right sort of people, but Bridlington is a town haunted by dark secrets - and the bill for looking the other way is about to come due...

REVIEW: In the vein of Stephen King's It where children are left to deal with the problems intentionally ignored (and sometimes openly exacerbated) by adults and generations past, Lockjaw exposes the "monster" underlying the veneer of civility, in towns small and large. Though at times effectively creepy and even surreal, sometimes it gets too clever for its own good with confusing timeline shifts and some exceptionally heavy-handed messages about silence in the face of injustices by the end.
Starting with young Chuck's doomed efforts to connect with a new group of outcast friends after being bullied on the playground, the tale goes to "Asher" and his seemingly carefree arrival in Bridlington with nothing but a dog for company. This is clearly a young man with secrets in his past, and it's just as clear that this small town has secrets of its own, even as he tries to ignore the pricklings of premonition that hang over his first introduction to the group of outcast kids. Other characters who become entangled in things include Paz's older sister, who has done everything in her power to distance herself from her peculiar sibling, and Beetle, a trans teen who is counting the seconds until he can escape to college and leave the whispers and cruelties of small town life in the dust. Creepy overtones and tension drift through the tale in a thickening miasma that sometimes obscures the plot itself, not helped by how the story jumps back and forth in time at random (it's possible this is an issue with the audiobook, that there is some hint in the printed version, because otherwise it comes across as an author trying to wow the reader with a two-by-four surprise that felt more like jerking me around for half the book), and eventually the promised supernatural/gory elements come to the forefront as the metaphoric chickens of Bridlington come home to roost. Asher, set up to be the main character, became my least favorite of the bunch, far too cagey with his past and shallow in his motives (the reason is later revealed, but by then my general dislike of his apparent shallow pursuit of popularity - even in the face of glaring red flags -had set in, plus even after the reveal he remained overreactive to an almost cartoonish degree when confronted with conflict, to the point of literally jumping around and denting his car door and needing to be socked in the face by another character to calm down). The latter parts feel drawn out to grind in the main lesson about the toxicity of brushing off bullying and abuse and intolerance as "not my business" and masking it as small-down politeness, and how the interest on those injustices compounds exponentially. The heavy hand of the Message smashes the reader in the face repeatedly by the end, to an almost numbing effect. This alone dropped it down to nearly three stars; the final half-star loss concerns the unnecessary cruelty of the fate of Bird the dog.

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