Top 16 Scary Books For Teens Updated 04 /2024

If you were afraid of classic YA thrillers like Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike when you were younger, you may not be ready for the new generation of scary YA books. Don't be surprised if the Purge, It Comes At Night, and Annabelle-loving teens in your life start reading these new YA horror books. If you're brave, read these.

Amity by Micol Ostow

Dreams of demons, destruction, and vengeance fill Connor's nights when he moves to Amity with his whole family.

For a new start, Gwen's family moves to Amity ten years after they first moved there. She is also haunted by lurid visions, disturbing voices, and questions about whether or not she is sane. People don't just live in Amity because it's more than just a house. She is a living thing that wants to use her power to make people do what she wants. He and Gwen will be used to bring about a violent end as she has done before.

As I Descended by Robin Talley

Maria and Lily are the most powerful couple at their school, even if no one else knows. Delilah is the only person who stands in the way of them having a perfect future. But what Delilah doesn't know is that Lily and Maria will do anything to win, even if that means using the dark power that has long been rumored to be on the old plantation where their school is now.

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

There are pills in the medicine cabinet and a lot of violet dresses in Hanna's dresser. She doesn't want to be the weird girl anymore, so she doesn't want to go to school at all anymore. To find a new home, she runs away. To make her own place, she finds out dark secrets that would scare anyone else. The good news for Hanna is that she's not like the rest of us. Crazy girl meets even more crazy town. Only two things are certain: Everything can happen and no one is safe.

Diary of a Haunting by M. Verano

There are lots of flies, spiders, and other pests in the old mansion Paige moves into with her family. She doesn't want to think about them. But soon, strange things start to happen: words that can't be read show up on the walls, and her little brother runs around the house at all hours of the night. When she learns about the sinister cult that ran experiments in the house almost a century ago, things get even more scary.

Dream Fall by Amy Plum

Cata has so much insomnia that she agrees to take part in a new experiment. Later, there's a problem with some of the lab equipment. Cata is one of seven young people who have no memory of how they got there, and they're all in a shared dream world with each other. Even worse, they're being hunted by monsters from their darkest dreams and tormented by secrets they'd rather keep a secret from the world around them.

Fiendish by Brenna Yovanoff

When Clementine was a child, dangerous and mysterious things began to happen in New South Bend. People in the town blamed the wicked people in the Willows for the fires, so they burned down their homes. She was alive for ten years because of magic, but she had to stay in the basement for that long. Then a boy comes and frees her. Clementine is back in the world, and she wants to find out what happened all those years before she was born. But the truth gets mixed up in the Hollow, which is a dangerous and fickle place that has become more temperamental since she came back.

The Girl From The Well by Rin Chupeco

A dead girl walks around. A murderer is on her list of things to look for. As with the man who killed her three hundred years ago, they are child killers. When a strange boy with strange tattoos moves into the neighborhood, she finds out that he does something else. As time goes on, both of them will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from their homes in American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Japan. Because the boy has a terrible secret that he would kill to keep from the world. This is why.

The Hallowed Ones by Laura Bickle

She's lived on an Amish farm all her life, but the outside world comes to her in this dark story. A lot of people say there is a lot of unrest on the "Outside." Something bad is out there. They make a rule: No one goes outside, and nobody comes in from the outside. In the end, though, Katie can't leave a young man to die. When she sneaks him into her family's barn, she doesn't tell anyone about it.

House of Furies by Madeleine Roux

It's great for Louisa to get a job as a maid at the boarding house she works at. That's not all: Soon after arriving at the mysterious owner of Coldthistle House, she starts to realize that the house is more than just a place to stay for his guests. The house isn't a place where people can relax. It's a place of judgment, and Mr. Morningside and his staff are there to do their own justice on people who can't be saved any more.

Mary: The Summoning by Hillary Monahan

There are three people who think they know how to summon Bloody Mary Worth, but Jess and her three friends don't. That's why Bloody Mary slips through the glass when their summoning circle is broken. A lot of things happen when the girls are trying to get away from Mary. Loyalty is questioned, friendships are torn apart and lives change for ever.

The May Queen Murders by Sarah Jude

A remote farming community in the Missouri Ozarks where Ivy and her family have lived for a long time has been called Rowan's Glen for a long time. Because Ivy has a cousin named Heather, she doesn't care what other kids think about the Glen kids at school. Ivy thinks the two girls share everything with each other. This is what Ivy learns when Heather goes missing after a May Day party. She finds out that both her best friend and her hometown are as full of secrets as the woods around them.

Shutter by Courtney Alameda

Micheline is one of the last people in the Van Helsing line to be born. Since she was a child, she has been learning how to fight both physical and spiritual monsters.

When a normal ghost hunt goes awry, she and her friends get a curse called a soulchain. People will die if she doesn't get rid of the chains in seven days. Micheline's father, a monster hunter, is now after her as a renegade agent, and she has to find and destroy an entity more powerful than anything she's ever encountered. die trying, or not try at all and die.

There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

There are a lot of gruesome murders taking place at Osborne High School. Each one has gotten worse and worse. Fear and the hunt for a killer grow closer as the dark secrets between them have to be dealt with. Fun, quick-witted, and impossible to put down: This is a new twist on the classic teen slasher story. It's also a lot of fun.

The Women in the Walls by Amy Lukavics

Lucy and Margaret, her cousins, grew up in a Victorian mansion in the middle of the woods with a cold, distant father. Lucy and Margaret found comfort in each other. In the end, Aunt Penelope died, and Margaret says that she can hear her dead mother's voice whispering in the walls. In the beginning, Lucy can only look on helplessly as her cousin loses her sense of reality. Then, she starts hearing voices of her own. She has to face a long-standing and lethal curse that has afflicted the women in her family for many years.

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