Horror Stories for Teens

Halloween is around the corner, and what better way to celebrate than to read these terrifying tales?

In The Black Girl Survives This One, edited by Desiree S. Evans, fifteen superb Black authors create ghastly and horrifying stories in which, as you may have guessed, the Black girls survive.  In one, a space traveler must confront those alien beings who, as her mother warned her, “steal faces.”  In another, teens attend a house party and find themselves trapped in a “ghost corn” maze.  Another story has a Black teen fighting a demon that has claimed the girls from one family for generations.

In Night of the Living Queers, edited by Shelly Page, thirteen authors tell tales of queer teens facing terrifying situations.  In one, a girl visits secret costume parties where teens leave with vastly different personalities.  In another, a teen races against time to save his little brother from the ghost of an evil clown.  Stories are often humorous and focus on characters of color.

Melissa Albert’s novel The Bad Ones follows Nora, who learns that her best friend Becca has suddenly disappeared, along with three other people in their small town. Can Becca’s string of clues and their childhood chant help Nora find her?

Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng tells how Sunny, Candie, and Mina formed a rising K-Pop group until Mina suddenly died. Now Candie wants to move on and reclaim her fame, but Sunny wants answers, and Mina’s death only gets more mysterious as their new competitors are dying.

In Kayla Cottingham’s novel This Delicious Death, melting glaciers release a strange pathogen that turns humans into cannibals, able to survive only if they eat other humans. Lab-grown human flesh provides an acceptable substitute for four afflicted friends who want to attend a concert, but one’s sudden disappearance at the show leads to chaos.

Ryan La Sala’s novel Beholder tells of Athan, who is the only survivor of a massacre at a fancy party, which makes him a prime suspect in the eyes of the police. Can his ability to see the recent past in his mirror reflections help him find the real killer?

Trang Thanh Tran’s novel She Is a Haunting follows bisexual teen Jade as she returns to Vietnam with her estranged father, where she encounters an old house that invades her dreams with ghosts from its colonial past.

~posted by Wally B.