Horror Reads

September 2024

In the last gloomy stages of winter, we've been exploring some of the more spooky and sinister parts of our teen collection.

Below you will find a list of horror themed teen fiction reading recommendations, as well as a spooky craft activity idea.

Horror teen fiction

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Archives of Despair

Caleb Finn

From the chilling mind of Caleb Finn comes his debut collection of ten stories to haunt your thoughts and fuel your darkest fears. You have been given access to secret files buried deep within the archives. Disturbing stories never meant for the light of day. Stories of evil grandparents and unsettling homework. A string of deaths, seemingly unrelated. Walls squirm, as if alive. A cursed wish comes true. Ordinary people behave oddly, even family and your closest friends... These stories share a common fate. All the children are met with tragedy. Coincidence? Or could these nightmares be connected by something more sinister than you dare to imagine? A dark and chilling mystery awaits. Find the answers, before he finds you.

 

 

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 The Taking of Jake Livingston

Ryan Douglass

Sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston sees dead people everywhere. But he can't decide what's worse: being a medium forced to watch the dead play out their last moments on a loop or being at the mercy of racist teachers as one of the few Black students at St Clair Prep. Both are a living nightmare he wishes he could wake up from. But things at St Clair start looking up with the arrival of another Black student, the handsome Allister and for the first time, romance is on the horizon for Jake. Unfortunately, life as a medium is getting worse. Though most ghosts are harmless, Sawyer Doon wants much more from Jake. In life, Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Now he's a powerful, vengeful ghost and he has plans for Jake. High school has become a different kind of survival game, one Jake is not sure he can win.

 

 

 
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 What Big Teeth

Rose Szabo

Rose Szabo's thrilling debut is a dark and thrilling novel about a teen girl who returns home to her strange, wild family after years of estrangement.

Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds.

Eleanor finds herself desperately trying to hold the family together — in order to save them all, Eleanor must learn to embrace her family of monsters and tame the darkness inside her.

 

 

 
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 Extasia

Claire Legrand

Her name is unimportant. All you must know is that today she will become one of the four saints of Haven. The elders will mark her and place the red hood on her head. With her sisters, she will stand against the evil power that lives beneath the black mountain-an evil which has already killed nine of her village's men. She will tell no one of the white-eyed beasts that follow her. Or the faceless grey women tall as houses. Or the girls she saw kissing in the elm grove. Today she will be a saint of Haven. She will rid her family of her mother's shame at last and save her people from destruction. She is not afraid. Are you.

 

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 House of Hollow

Krystal Sutherland

Iris Hollow and her two older sisters are unquestionably strange. Ever since they disappeared on a suburban street in Scotland as children only to return a month a later with no memory of what happened to them, odd, eerie occurrences seem to follow in their wake. And they're changing. First, their dark hair turned white. Then, their blue eyes slowly turned black. They have insatiable appetites yet never gain weight. People find them disturbingly intoxicating, unbearably beautiful and inexplicably dangerous. But now, ten years later, seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow is doing all she can to fit in and graduate high school on time -- something her two famously glamorous globe-trotting older sisters, Grey and Vivi, never managed to do. But when Grey goes missing without a trace, leaving behind bizarre clues as to what might have happened, Iris and Vivi are left to trace her last few days. They aren't the only ones looking for her though. As they brush against the supernatural they realise that the story they've been told about their past is unravelling and the world that returned them seemingly unharmed ten years ago, might just be calling them home.

 

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The Invocations

Krystal Sutherland

Three girls, one supernatural killer on the loose. Zara Jones believes in magic because the alternative is too painful to consider-that her murdered sister is gone forever and there is nothing she can do about it. Rather than grieving and moving on, Zara decides she will do whatever it takes to claw her sister back from the grave-even trading in the occult. Jude Wolf may be the daughter of a billionaire, but she is also undeniably cursed. After a deal with a demon went horribly wrong, her soul has been slowly turning necrotic. It's a miserable existence marred by pain, sickness, and monstrous things that taunt her in the night. Now that she's glimpsed what's beyond the veil, Jude's desperate to find someone to undo the damage she's done to herself. Enter Emer Byrne, an orphaned witch with a dark past and a deadly power, a.k.a. the solution to both Zara's and Jude's problems. Though Emer lives a hardscrabble life, she gives away her most valuable asset-her invocations-to women in desperate situations who are willing to sacrifice a piece of their soul in exchange for a scrap of power. Zara and Jude are willing, but they first have to find Emer. When Emer's clients start turning up dead all over London, a vital clue leads Zara and Jude right to her. If a serial killer is targeting her clients, Emer wants to know why-and to stop them. She strikes a tenuous alliance with Zara and Jude to hunt a killer before they are next on his list, even if she can't give them in return what Zara and Jude want most: a sister and a soul.

 

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The Stars Did Wander Darkling

Colin Meloy

"All of a sudden, the most ordinary things have taken on a sinister edge: a penny on a doormat. A man in a brown suit under a streetlamp. The persistent sound of an axe chopping in the middle of the night. He keeps telling himself that this is Seaham, a sleepy seaside town where nothing ever happens. Or at least nothing did, until his dad's construction company opened up the cliff beneath the old - some say cursed - Langdon place. Soon, though, he and his friends can't deny it: more and more of the adults in town are acting strangely. An ancient, long-buried evil has been unleashed upon the community, and it's up to the kids to stop it before it's too late..."

 

 

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We Don't Swim Here

Vincent Tirado

Bronwyn is only supposed to be in rural Hillwoods for a year. Her grandmother is in hospice, and her father needs to get her affairs in order. And they're all meant to make some final memories together. Except Bronwyn is miserable. Her grandmother is dying, everyone is standoffish, and she can't even go swimming. All she hears are warnings about going in the water, despite a gorgeous lake. And a pool at the abandoned rec center. And another in the high school basement. Anais tries her hardest to protect Bronwyn from the shadows of Hillwoods. She follows her own rituals to avoid any unnecessary attention -- and if she can just get Bronwyn to stop asking questions, she can protect her too. The less Bronwyn pays attention to Hillwoods, the less Hillwoods will pay attention to Bronwyn. She doesn't get that the lore is, well, truth. History. Pain. The living aren't the only ones who seek retribution when they're wronged. But when Bronwyn does more exploring than she should, they are both in for danger they couldn't expect.

 

 

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 Where He Can't Find You

Darcy Coates

DON'T WALK ALONE, OR THE STITCHER WILL FIND YOU.

Abby Ward lives in a town haunted by disappearances. People vanish, and when they're found, their bodies have been dismembered and sewn back together in unnatural ways. But is it the work of a human killer…or something far darker?

DON'T STAY OUT LATE, OR THE STITCHER WILL TAKE YOU.

She and her younger sister live by a strict set of rules designed to keep them safe―which is why it's such a shock when Hope is taken. Desperate to get her back, Abby tells the police everything she knows, but they claim their hands are tied.

DON'T CLOSE YOUR EYES, OR THE STITCHER WILL REMAKE YOU.

With every hour precious, Abby and her friends are caught in a desperate game of cat and mouse. They have to get Hope back. Quickly. Before too much of her is cut away. And before everything they care about is swallowed up by the darkness waiting in the tunnels beneath the home they thought they knew.

 

 

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You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight

Kalynn Bayron

Charity Curtis has the summer job of her dreams, playing the "final girl" at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business. But the last weekend of the season, Charity's co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity's role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they'll need figure out what this killer is after. Is there is more to the story of Mirror Lake and its dangerous past than Charity ever suspected?

 

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 The Spider and her Demons

Sydney Khoo

Between surviving high school and working at her aunt's dumpling shop, all Zhi wants is to find time for her friends ... and make sure no one finds out she's half spider-demon. But when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl in school, she discovers she might not be the scariest thing in the shadows. Uncover an extraordinary world of demons and witches, where the ones you love can hurt you the most and hiding your true self can get you killed.

 

 

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The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

Tori Bovalino

A cemetery full of the restless dead. A town so wicked it has already burned twice, with the breath of the third fire looming. A rural, isolated bridge with a terrifying monster waiting for the completion of its summoning ritual. A lake that allows the drowned to return, though they have been changed by the claws of death. These are the shadowed, liminal spaces where the curses and monsters lurk, refusing to be forgotten.

 

 

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Night Games

R.L. Stine

Diane and her friends get a thrill out of sneaking out in the middle of the night and playing pranks, but things get ugly when Diane's boyfriend decides to seek revenge against his hated math teacher and when the pranks turn to murder Diane realises they are all in too deep.

 

 

 

   More titles

Click here to see more Horror Teen Fiction titles available through the library catalogue

 

 

   

Horror Craft Activity

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Horror Sculpture Making

Adelaide artist Jayden Harding is running a horror themed sculpture making crafternoon session at Unley Civic Library during the October School Holidays. You can see an example of his creepy creature sculptures to the left.

If you want to get crafty at home this spooky season and make your own horror sculpture you will need;

- Polymer clay in a neutral colour like white, grey or beige

- Floral wire

- aluminium foil 

- carving tools, things like toothpicks or metal cutlery will also work

Sketch out some ideas of what you'd like your creepy creature to look like. Then create a skeleton-like frame out of the wire and use aluminium foil to bulk out the shape of your creature. Mold your polymer clay to your creature's body using your hands and tools. Then shape, carve, and add detail until you're happy with how your creation looks.

Bake your polymer clay in the oven according to the cooking instructions on the packaging. Once your clay creature has cooled completely you can paint and decorate to add more even more horrific details!

 

 

   

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