i want to solve cain’s jawbone and possibly never return to normal society

in which i volunteer to be psychologically dismantled by a cryptid from 1934

I think I want to solve Cain’s Jawbone.

And by “solve,” I mean dedicate an unreasonable portion of my life to an impossibly difficult literary murder puzzle that was written by a man who clearly believed empathy was for the weak.

Cain’s Jawbone is not a novel. It is a threat. It is a brick of chaos in paperback form.

The premise is simple in theory and demonic in execution. One hundred pages, all printed in the wrong order. Six murders. One killer. All the clues are there, apparently, if you’re smart enough, paranoid enough, or spiritually deranged.

It was published in 1934 by Edward Powys Mathers, a crossword compiler who went by the name “Torquemada.” Which is the name of a literal Spanish Inquisitor. That should have been the first sign.

Only three people solved it in its first seventy years of existence. Someone did it recently. The internet called them a genius. I looked at that and thought, “me too, probably.” Which is how my downfall begins.

Because this is not a casual activity. This is not knitting. This is not Sudoku. This is me with a cup of cold tea and a wall of red yarn, muttering phrases like “but if the colonel is also the footman then why is the poem referencing a butcher.”

I do not want to be healthy about this. I want to become one of those people who gets very quiet at brunch and then says, “sorry, I just figured out that Chapter 12 is a red herring and now I need to go re-pin everything.”

I want to make charts. I want to give myself paper cuts. I want to slowly go insane with joy as I fall down rabbit holes that lead nowhere, circle back, and then accidentally stumble across something real at 3 a.m.

I want this book to ruin me. Not permanently. Just enough to make me weird.

And maybe I will never finish. Maybe I will end up sobbing into a stack of index cards with murder suspects written in fountain pen. But I will know I lived.

I will know I stood in front of the literary gods and said, “yes, give me nonsense. Give me torment. I am ready.”

And they said, “okay, here is a paperback with all the pages in the wrong order, good luck.”

So now I have to do it. Obviously.