Go Ahead - Get Scared

It can be hard to predict what sorts of books will be scary to different readers. For some, a tightly wound, suspenseful story is scary. Others need gore, while some readers are frightened by real life threats such as murder or assault. So here are a few scary-type books to try.



Ashes by Ilsa Bick
YA Bick
Alex, a resourceful seventeen-year-old running from her incurable brain tumor, Tom, who has left the war in Afghanistan, and Ellie, an angry eight-year-old, join forces after an electromagnetic pulse sweeps through the sky and kills most of the world's population, turning some of those who remain into zombies and giving the others superhuman senses. 





Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake
YA Blake
For three years, seventeen-year-old Cas Lowood has carried on his father's work of dispatching the murderous dead, traveling with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat, but everything changes when he meets Anna, a girl unlike any ghost he has faced before.  






The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
YA Ness
Pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron, young Todd and Viola set out across New World searching for answers about his colony's true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing hopeful settlers from Old World.     






The Enemy by Charlie Higson
YA Higson
After a disease turns everyone over sixteen into brainless, decomposing, flesh-eating creatures, a group of teenagers leave their shelter and set out on a harrowing journey across London to the safe haven of Buckingham Palace.  

Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry
YA Maberry
In a post-apocalyptic world where fences and border patrols guard the few people left from the zombies that have overtaken civilization, fifteen-year-old Benny Imura is finally convinced that he must follow in his older brother's footsteps and become a bounty hunter.