Frightfully Good Young Adult Horror Just in Time for Halloween

Posted on September 14, 2021

by Joyce S

Are you looking for a good scary story? YA fiction is full of good horror: from ghosts to demons, spine-chilling houses to serial killers. Take a look at any of these stories to get you through the Halloween season. Just be sure to keep a bit of light on at night (to go to the bathroom, not because you’re scared of the creepy things that go bump in the night…)

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Cover of Sawkill Girls

Sawkill Girls

By Claire Legrand

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hoopla eAudio

Stories of Marion, Zoey, and Val come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. This is also a place where kids whisper about the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires; where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil that no one dares to fight.

Cover of Ten

Ten

By Gretchen McNeil

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hoopla eAudio

Best friends Meg and Minnie are looking forward to the weekend of their lives at an exclusive house party on Henry Island: days of boys, booze, and fun-filled luxury. Fun turns twisted after a discovery of a DVD with a sinister message: Vengeance is mine. The teens find themselves quickly cut off from the outside world as a storm rages on outside. A mysterious killer begins picking them off one by one. As the deaths become more violent, the teens begin to turn on one another.

Cover of The Taking of Jake Livingston

The Taking of Jake Livingston

By Ryan Douglass

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Libby eAudio

Jake is one of the only Black kids at St. Clair Prep with one of the others being his infinitely more popular older brother. It’s already hard to fit in, but what makes matters worse is that Jake can also see the dead. And there are a lot of them around all the time. Most of them are harmless and they usually do not interact with people. And then there is Sawyer, a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school last year before taking his own life. Sawyer is now a vengeful ghost with plans in his afterlife. Suddenly, Jake has to throw everything that he knows about ghosts out the window as Sawyer begins to haunt him and bodies are starting to turn up in his own neighborhood.

Cover of The Woods Are Always Watching

The Woods Are Always Watching

By Stephanie Perkins

Neena and Josie have always been outsiders in high school. One thing was for sure: they always had each other. Now that they have both entered college and are two thousand miles away from each other, they have one last chance to be together: a three-day hike deep into the woods of the Pisgah National Forest.

Cover of The Mary Shelley Club

The Mary Shelley Club

By Goldy Moldavsky

Libby eAudio

Rachel Chavez is eager to make a fresh start at Manchester Prep, but struggles to fit in. She then gets caught up in a prank gone awry and with more enemies than friends. To her surprise, the prank also attracts the attention of the Mary Shelley Club whose main objective is to come up with the scariest prank to orchestrate real fear.

Cover of The Missing Season

The Missing Season

By Gillian French

hoopla eBook

Clara moves into Pender, a town with an unexpected Season. Bree and Sage, two townspeople that have taken Clara under their wing, tells her about the Mumbler, the monster out of the marshes that is behind the reason why kids go missing in October.

Cover of Ghost Wood Song

Ghost Wood Song

By Erica Waters

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hoopla eAudio

Shady Grove inherited her father’s ability to call ghosts from the grave with his fiddle. She also happens to know that the fiddle’s tunes brings nothing but trouble and darkness. When her brother is suddenly accused of murder, Shady can’t let the dead keep their secrets. In order to save her brother, she would have to make the ghosts sing.

Cover of As I Descended

As I Descended

By Robin Talley

Libby eAudio

Maria and Lily are their school’s ultimate power couple, even if no one knows it but them. The only thing that stands between them and their perfect future is campus superstar Delilah: a legend at the exclusive Archeron Academy. She runs the school, and if she chose, she could blow up Maria and Lily’s whole world with just one look or a carefully placed word. What Delilah doesn’t know is that Maria and Lily would do anything to make their dreams come true.

Cover of House of Furies

House of Furies

By Madeleine Roux

Libby eBook

Louisa is thrilled to find a job as a maid at a boarding house after escaping a harsh school where punishment was the lesson of the day. After arriving at Coldthistle House, she begins to realize that the owner is providing much more than lodging for his guests. Louisa begins to fear for Lee, a young man who is both charismatic and kind. She may be his only way out of an untimely judgment.

Cover of What Big Teeth

What Big Teeth

By Rose Szabo

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hoopla eAudio

Eleanor has been estranged from her wild family for years but has no choice to go back to the home that she left behind after fleeing a horrifying incident at her boarding school. Unfortunately, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives upon arrival. Nonetheless, she finds herself desperately trying to hold the family together in order to save them, all while learning to embrace her family of monsters and to tame the darkness within her.

Cover of Dreamfall

Dreamfall

By Amy Plum

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A half breed telepath joins a research team on Refuge, a home world of his mother’s people. He finds trouble almost immediately when he helps a woman escape human pursuers. They must somehow forge the ruins of the past to save his people and himself.

Cover of The House With a Clock In Its Walls

The House With a Clock In Its Walls

By John Bellairs

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Book Kit

Lewis experiments with magic and unknowingly resurrects the former owner of the house: a woman named Serenna Izard, unveiling that she and her husband built a timepiece into the walls: a clock that could obliterate humankind!

Cover of Wilder Girls

Wilder Girls

By Rory Power

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Libby eAudio

It’s been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty’s life out from under her. It started slowly at first with teachers dying one by one. Then, it infected the students: their bodies turned strange and foreign. The school is now cut off from the rest of the world, left to fend for themselves. The girls don’t dare to wander outside of the school’s fence, deeming it wild and dangerous. The Tox seeps into everything, though. When Byatt goes missing, Hetty braves the choice to go look for her, even if it means breaking quarantine.

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