Creepy Fun: 35 New YA Horror Books To Devour

After her best friend Kitty dies, Molly is swept away from the orphanage where she lives to begin a new life with her “aunt.” Her life here is in complete contrast with her old one, especially as she’s been brought into the business of collecting fresh corpses to help medical students learn the practice. It’s a risky job, especially in 1850s Philadelphia, where more than one person is in the business, seeking to make a name for themselves.

But then, Molly discovers there may be far more to this trade — far more to her family legacy — than she could ever imagine and more, she may learn who it was that killed her best friend.

Can a small town in the Louisiana bayou be filled with psychics who have no idea what happened to a person gone missing?

Grey, who spends her summers in La Cachette, has a hard time believing no one knows what happened to her bestie Elora. Everyone seems to be hiding something from her and from each other. So when a stranger emerges from the bayou, Grey and the rest of the folks in town realize this is a far more dangerous place than they’d already presumed.

(The little alligator eye in the top right corner of the book cover is killing me in the best way).

If haunted murderous houses are your jam, this book will be right up your ally.

Bram’s itching to disappear from her life, and to get away from her past and the secrets which haunt it, she travels to the small town of Louth, where her uncle is rehabbing an old mansion. But her uncle’s heavy with secrets and sadness, too, after losing his wife in a fire that locals think his daughter set.

The manor her uncle is working on is capital-C creepy, and so are the townspeople of Louth, who are convincing Bram that the house where she’s living is haunted by the spirits of girls who died within it. Much as she wants to ignore those rumors, though, the more time she spends in the house, the more and more real they seem.

Even though she’s the host of the paranormal investigation podcast Attachments, Dare Chase doesn’t believe in ghosts. Eager to get people to tune into her show, Dare takes up an investigation in Arrington Estate where, 30 years prior, a teen girl drowned in the estate’s lake and her spirit still wanders the grounds.

Dare might be here for the strange circumstances of the girl’s death and her conviction that there’s a living suspect responsible…but the estate, as well as the cute girl living there, might prove otherwise and cause Dare to rethink her stance on ghosts.

This is a book about a girl who gets witch-like powers on her period and she uses them to help take down a douchey dude who spouts toxic masculinity left and right, and frankly, that’s all I needed to be super sold on this book.

The first in a duology that retells classic Poe, McGinnis’s novel follows Tress, who lost her entire family in a terrible accident seven years prior. Her family has been well-respected, but following the accident, she’s been living with her grandfather at a place locals call the “White Trash Zoo” (it is a loose, loose interpretation of a zoo).

Felicity, on the other hand, is at the top of the social ladder and has buried the truth of what happened the night Tress’s parents died. She was the other person in the car with them.

Tress wants the truth, though, and she has a plan: A Halloween party, where she can invite Felicity, prying the truth from her as she slowly encloses her in a coal chute.

…And there is a panther on the loose.

Sapphic dark academia? Yes, please.

Felicity’s returning to finish high school at the ivy-covered campus where her girlfriend died last year. She’s been away from school for a year, but she’ll be back in the same dorm where she’d lived before: the Goodwin House, rumored to be the former home of the Dalloway five, girls many believed to be witches who all died one after another on the Goodwin grounds.

Ellis is a first year student, and though she’s amassed a loyal following — she’s a prodigy and has already written a novel — she seeks out Felicity to help her with her second novel. The topic? The Dalloway five.

History may be repeating itself now, especially as Ellis employs her style of “method writing,” to tell the story.

Welcome to the vampire revenge club.

Elton turned Holly into an eternal 16-year-old in 1987. She was promised love, but he left her, and now the only job she can work as a forever-16-year-old is at Taco Bell.

Then Holly meets Rose — turned forever 16 by Elton in 1954 — and Ida — turned forever 16 by Elton, ex-finance, in 1921.

Together, the girls will be ganging up to ensure Elton doesn’t take another victim. They’ll be the ones getting the last eternal laugh.

This one sounds like a fun read-alike to Lily Anderson’s Undead Girl Gang.

Rachel is the new kid at her school, and as a scholarship student, she’s already an outcast. When she’s caught in a prank gone bad, she fears it’s over for her socially.

But that prank catches the attention of the Mary Shelley Club, a group of students who seek to come up with the best prank to truly scare fellow students. It’s a competition, and the consequences may be deadly, especially as the Club begins to turn on itself.

So what happens if the take of Bloody Mary is true? Sarles explores the myths behind the legend of Bloody Mary through a group of teens who, five years prior, play the game at a sleepover. Weird things happened, sure, but the weirdest happens when the friend group breaks up, and the girl whose house in which the game was played finds a creepy figure in the mirror who hadn’t been there before.

The pitch for this one is “Practical Magic meets Twister,” but really, it needs to also address this is a novel about a single witch who has the power to impact the spread of climate change and whether or not she’s up to the task when she finds herself falling in love.

It’s the1890s, and while Zuretta is content in her home in rural Utah, her sister yearns for more. Ruby’s traveled to Chicago, where the World’s Fair is happening, and now she’s disappeared. Zuretta wants to know what happened so travels there herself, taking a job at the last known place of employment Ruby had — a mysterious hotel called The Castle.

One by one, women are disappearing from this “hotel,” and Zuretta discovers she herself is now entangled in a serial murder plot. How can she save herself, the other people around her, and get to the bottom of what happened to Ruby?

There’s always something about restoring those old houses, isn’t there? In this first book in a series, Stephanie’s dad is renovating a crumbling Victorian mansion and her younger sister, as well as classmates at school, are working to convince her it’s home to a monster. It might take two boys who have entered her life for Stephanie to understand what’s really going on in this little project of her father’s.

Creagh’s novel is inspired by, as you might have guessed, the classic Phantom of the Opera.

Natasha’s sister went missing and her car was found at the Bend, and she wants answers. Della and her family have conjured magic from the Bend, setting spells for those who are desperate. When Natasha arrives at Della’s door, itching to find out what happened to her sister, Della knows this is going to be a case requiring a lot more than a little magic.

Becca’s just transferred to a new high school and is stoked when she quickly finds herself welcomed into one of the most popular groups.

Turns out, that group is a gang of female werewolves who love to take down slimy boys. It’s fun and necessary but when the cops begin looking for a serial killer after a boy gets killed, suddenly, things aren’t as fun or easy as they may seem.

Jake is one of the only Black kids at his private school and he’s definitely not as cool as his older brother. It doesn’t help that Jake sees the dead around him all the time. While most of the dead spirits he sees are harmless — they’re just stuck in a loop — when he meets Sawyer, Jake realizes not all spirits are harmless and everything he thought he knew about interacting with the dead has flown out the window. Now, he has to survive not only high school but a vengeful spirit.

A mine explosion years ago made Moon Basin uninhabitable and dangerous. The ex-mining town, now New Basin, isn’t any less dangerous but is able now to use its history as a means of drawing in tourists.

But the people of New Basin are starting to experience weird things. Clem and Nina, best friends, have brought two new people into their circle and decide they’re going to go into the mine and find out what’s really going on in town.

Estranged from her family for years, Eleanor’s coming back to them after a horrifying incident at her boarding school. But can she fit in with these monsters again? And what does her family legacy say about her and her own powers?

Welcome to a magical, witchy world of New York City in 1911. Frances works as a seamstress, and when she’s attacked and a man ends up dead at her feet, she’s unable to explain exactly how her scissors ended up in his neck.

She’s immediately swept up and taken to Haxahaven Sanitarium, which isn’t what it seems. It’s instead a school for witches, and while she loves the magic she’s learning, she wants to play bigger, beyond the walls of Haxahaven. But now she’s caught the attention of a leader who wants magical control of the city and she must decide whether to use her powers to solve a personal crime, to take on huge power, or to pursue a boy with whom she’s falling in love (and/or some combination of them all).

First in a duology, this Jamaican-inspired novel follows two enemy witches who have to team up in order to combat a common enemy. For readers who love cat and mouse stories, this one’s especially for you.

This brand-new read has an eager, growing fandom already.

Survival novels are my idea of true horror, and Perkins delivers with this story of best friends Neena and Josie, who are taking one last trip together before they attend college thousands of miles apart. Their destination is a three-day hike in a national forest. But when they go off-trail, they find themselves in a living, hellish nightmare.

This graphic novel, written by Dugan and illustrated by Seaton, follows a young witch whose coven members are murdered. She travels back to upstate New York from California in order to hone her craft and solve the murders before more of her family is killed.

Are you ready for a YA retelling of Strangers on a Train by horror master McNeil? Because I sure know I am.

Haven is the only place where humanity survives after wicked women have destroyed the plant. It is, essentially, a cult, and Amity is becoming a saint — a vessel for people to take out the sins upon, as elected by village elders. A series of gruesome and unnatural deaths within Haven have Amity and fellow saints curious and now, she must decide whether to continue watching bodies pile up or try to save Haven.

Think Blair Witch but with a group of YouTube teen stars, set in a haunted hotel.

I am deeply in love with this cover.

The first in a trilogy, this is a new series in the Buffyverse. It follows a teen girl at New Sunnydale High School who is the daughter of one of most infamous and powerful witch alumna…Willow Rosenberg.

If you love thrillers, this one has your name on it, ESPECIALLY if you’re game for a contemporary take on the Lizzy Borden murders.

Leigh’s book follows Charlotte, whose mother died six months ago under mysterious circumstances. She’s been told her mother’s heart stopped, but both she and her sister know that can’t be the case. And with their father and their mother’s personal assistant moving on from mother’s death, Charlotte and her sister are determined to know what really happened.

Hello, contemporary take on Carrie! Long-time YA readers will recognize Schroeder’s name, as she’s written a number of backlist romantic reads, so seeing her pen a horror novel is absolutely thrilling.

Mario’s been a loner throughout high school and on prom night, he takes a girl with him as a favor to his mom. But the night goes weird, quick: he’s crowned Prom King, despite being unpopular, and then, when driving his date home, he finds the Prom Queen dead in a ditch. He’s being called the murderer, even though this night has been nothing but a wormy nightmare for him.

Boo’s graphic novel follows a teen witch at a magical academy who is determined to solve the mystery of a missing classmate. But…there might be way more secrets to be unraveled as the witch seeks out the answer to that disappearance.

Zharie is a 16-year-old dancer who has started to see zombies everywhere. Now, in her quest to determine why she’s the only one who is able to see them, she has the potential to understand the truth of her mother’s death.

Mesmortes Coven Academy is a school in a Florida witchtown, where Logan will hone her skills as a baby witch. She’s quickly taken under the wings of three of the academy’s most infamous and powerful witches, and together with the townspeople — with whom there is an unsettling relationship — they must work to contain chaos about to reign during Haunting Season.