9 YA horror novels to become obsessed with this spooky season
Reading ‘She is a Haunting’ by Trang Thanh Tran ahead of our episode for The Dark Academicals podcast coming up on Halloween (you can listen to the podcast right here!) and it’s just got me thinking about all the YA horror out there. I’m honestly a bit too much of a wuss for full-on, adult horror, but YA horror is a great mid-ground for me. It’s scary, sometimes gruesome, and haunting enough to give me a chill, but it doesn’t keep me up at night. That’s all I ask for from my horror - no nightmares, please.
I generally lean horror with haunted houses, ghosts and some kind of body horror, so that’s mainly what the list below comprises of. There’s a mixture of things I’ve read, and things I’d love to read.
The titles are:
‘She is a Haunting’ by Trang Thanh Tran - a sapphic haunted house novel set in Vietnam about post-colonialism and family trauma.
‘You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight’ by Kalynn Bayron - Charity has a dream summer drop as a ‘final girl’ at camp, until her co-workers start disappearing and she may have to try and be a ‘final girl’ for real.
‘Mister Magic’ by Kiersten White - when former child stars reunite to uncover the tragedy that ended their show, they also discover the secret of its enigmatic host.
‘Wilder Girls’ by Rory Power - eighteen months ago, the Tox hit the Raxter School for Girls and it was put under quarantine. First the teachers died and now the girls’ bodies are changing one by one as they wait for the cure that they’ve been promised.
‘This Delicious Death’ by Kayla Cottingham - when the Arctive permafrost melted, it released a pathogen that caused some people to transform - a process known as the Harrowing. They now crave human flesh and without it, they turn feral, before a synthetic substitute was created, turning people into ghouls.
‘House of Hollow’ by Krystal Sutherland - when Iris and her sisters were children, they were kidnapped and returned with no memory and a moon-shaped scar. When her oldest sister disappears once more, Iris is determined to fid our what happened to them as children and find her sister.
‘The Spirit Bares Its Teeth’ by Andrew Joseph White - it’s 1883 and the veil between the living and the dead has thinned and mediums commune with spirits and Silas would do anything not to become one.
‘The Taking of Jake Livingston’ by Ryan Douglass - Jake can see the dead, and most ghosts are harmless, until he meets Sawyer who when he was alive shot and killed some of his classmates the year before. Now he’s a powerful and vengeful ghost, and Jake may not survive him.
‘I Feed Her to the Beast, and the Beast is Me’ by Jamison Shea - when Laure ventures into the Parisian Catacombs, she makes a deal with a river of blood to help her climb to the top of the Parisian ballet company she’s a part of. But the beast has turned her into a monster and she quickly becomes a target.
What’s on your spooky season TBR?
Written by Sophie
