Lots of great horror novels for teens have come out in the last year. Here are eight of the best to enjoy this spooky season! (MS = middle school)
Gigi Griffis’ creepy novel And the Trees Stare Back follows Vik and her little sister Anna, who has been missing in the cursed forest for five years. One day, she returns, unharmed. But was Anna ever really meant to leave the forest, and is this even her?
In Bad Creek by June Peyton, Iris, Gum, and Aidan are spending the summer in Bad Creek once again, but ever since Iris’s older sister Glory drowned last year, the others cannot manage their grief and wonder about their own guilt in her death. When Iris sleepwalks to a house Glory obsessively sketched, the trio knows they must find the truth inside if they are to find peace themselves.
Norwegian author Ingvild Bjerkeland has her first English translation in the novel Beasts, a dystopian horror that imagines our world overrun by beasts of unknown origin. Abdi and Alva have been on their own, struggling to survive since these beasts put an end to civilization. Hoping to find their father on a remote island, they cross a wasteland, facing sickness and other desperate humans, as well as the bizarre monsters themselves. MS
Madeleine Roux’s novel A Girl Walks Into the Forest follows beautiful Valla, who is to be married to a wealthy count. On her journey through the magical forest, she is mauled and disfigured by one of the wood’s creatures. Enraged by her horrible appearance, Count Leonid cages her in her room, where she soon hears voices from the woods telling her to get revenge on him.
A somewhat lighter story is How to Survive a Slasher by Justine Pucella Winans, which follows CJ, who must rely on her knowledge of horror movies to evade her town’s resident serial killer when an anonymous author sends her a manuscript for the serial killer’s next movie.
Clay McLeod Chapman’s novel Shiny Happy People follows Kyra and her new friend Logan, who have no problem avoiding Spore, the weird new drug circulating through their school and town, but how can they continue when even some of their teachers tell them they must take it and adjust to the world?
Vanessa Montalban’s novel These Vengeful Wishes follows Ceci and her mom as they move to a new home in her mom’s strange hometown, which is reputed to be cursed by a witch, La Cegua. As Ceci learns more of La Cegua, her empathy grows for the wronged witch, and the discovery of a wishing well allows her to fulfil some of her wildest dreams. But every wish has its price.
In Joel A. Sutherland’s The Whisperings, Joana, her brother Peter, and their father move to a new house any time her dad hears “the whisperings,” but their new house has a family of ghosts all its own, doomed to relive their deaths every single night.
~posted by Wally B.