13 Spooky Teen Reads
Everyone loves a good spooky book around Halloween. Below are 13 picks to scare you out of your mind. (Note: books with an * are adult books for young adults)
1. Heartwood Box
Ann Aguirre
When Araceli Flores Harper is sent to stay with her great-aunt, the plan is simple: she’ll buckle down and get ready for college. But her great-aunt still leaves food for the husband who went missing twenty years ago, and local businesses are plastered with MISSING posters. There are unexplained lights in the woods and a mysterious lab just beyond the city limits that the locals don’t talk about. Ever. To solve these riddles and bring the lost home again, Araceli must delve into a truly diabolical conspiracy, but some secrets fight to stay buried…
2. Anna Dressed in Blood
Kendare Blake
For three years, 17-year-old Cas Lowood has carried on his father’s work of dispatching the murderous dead, but everything changes when he meets Anna, a girl unlike any ghost he has faced before.
3. Dreams and Shadows*
Robert Cargill
Swapped for a changeling by the Bendith Y Mamau when he was just an infant, Ewan Thatcher grows up in the Limestone Kingdom—a magical realm located, oddly enough, just outside of Austin, Texas. But Ewan isn’t the only human to end up in this mythical place. Thanks to the intervention of the djinn Yashar, young Colby Stephens gets his wish: to become a wizard. But life in the Limestone Kingdom is far from paradise: scheming gods and fairies have their own plans for their mortal wards.
4. The Girl from the Well
Rin Chupeco
Okiku has wandered the world for centuries, freeing the innocent ghosts of the murdered-dead and taking the lives of killers with the vengeance they are due, but when she meets Tark, she knows the moody teen with the series of intricate tattoos is not a monster and needs to be freed from the demonic malevolence that clings to him.
5. Be Not Afraid
Cecilia Galante
Since her mother’s suicide, high school junior Marin has seen people’s pain as colors and shapes. But what she sees in her classmate Cassie—who forced Marin to participate in a weird conjoining ritual—is much more frightening and deadly.
6. Gwendy’s Button Box*
Stephen King
There are three ways up to Castle View from the town of Castle Rock: Route 117, Pleasant Road, and the Suicide Stairs. Every day in the summer of 1974, twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson has taken the stairs, which are held by strong, if time-rusted, iron bolts, and zig-zag up the cliffside. Then one day, when Gwendy gets to the top of Castle View, after catching her breath and hearing the shouts of kids on the playground below, a stranger calls to her. There on a bench in the shade sits a man in black jeans, a black coat, and a white shirt unbuttoned at the top. On his head is a small, neat black hat. The time will come when Gwendy has nightmares about that hat.
7. Teeth in the Mist
Dawn Kurtagich
Inspired by the legend of Faust and told in alternating timelines, sixteen-year-old Roan arrives at Mill House as a ward and discovers she is connected to an ancient evil secret. At the same time, centuries later, seventeen-year-old Zoey explores the dwelling’s ruins and soon realizes she is not alone.
8. Sweet
Emmy Laybourne
The luxurious celebrity cruise celebrating the launch of the trendy new diet sweetener Solu should be the vacation of a lifetime. It takes a horrifyingly wrong turn when the gig becomes an expose on Solu’s shocking side effects.
9. Hex*
Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children’s beds for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened, or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.
The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated by being kept in lockdown, the town’s teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past.
10. House of Furies
Madeleine Roux
Escaping from her harsh school before finding work as a maid in an English boarding house, Louisa realizes that her mysterious employer and his staff execute cruel judgments on the guests.
Place a Hold / Also Available in Spanish
11. Out of Salem
Hal Schrieve
When a local psychiatrist is murdered by what seems to be werewolves, a small town becomes even more hostile to “monsters.” Z, a genderqueer orphaned zombie, and Aysel, an unregistered werewolf, are driven together in an attempt to survive a place where most people wish that neither of them existed.
12. Last Things
Jacqueline West
Anders Thorson, frontman of his metal band, Last Things, is unusually gifted for a teenager, but strange things in the Minnesota woods near his hometown are threatening him. Thea, the new girl in town, says she’s there to protect him but is that the whole truth?
13. The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
Chris Wooding
In a world similar to Victorian London, Thaniel, a 17-year-old hunter of deadly, demonic creatures called the wych-kin, takes in a lost, possessed girl and becomes embroiled in a plot to unleash evil on the world.