Spine-Chilling Stories to Give Teens the Creeps
RSSJoyce Adams Burner, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 10/06/2009
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Fleeting shadows flitting past the corner of your eye? Startled by eerie creaks in the dark? Turn the calendar page to October and uncanny occurrences lurk around every corner. Teen readers clamor for imaginatively weird tales, and the authors of these hot-off-the-press young adult titles deliver with hair-raisingly good storytelling. It’s no trick to shake up fall reading—just treat students to frighteningly great reads!
Ominous Sense of Place
“As she stepped through the unlocked cemetery gates, Rebecca swallowed hard. She’d come this far—she had to go on. The cemetery was pitch-black and eerie. The huge marble tombs with their towering urns and crosses—indistinct menacing shapes in the darkness—loomed over her.” Paula Morris’s Ruined: A Ghost Story (Scholastic, 2009; Gr 7-9) finds New York City girl Rebecca Brown, 15, shuttled off to live in New Orleans with tarot-reading Aunt Claudia. Struggling with culture shock and socially sidelined at her lineage-conscious private academy, Rebecca befriends Lisette, a shabby ghost hanging around creepy Lafayette Cemetery. With Lisette’s help, Rebecca investigates the local lore of a prominent family’s curse, only to uncover her own terrifying role in its dark secrets. Saturated in Mardi Gras parades and krewes, debutante balls, Cajun cuisine, old moneyed families, voodoo, and Southern traditions, Ruined evokes the beauty, charm, and lingering racism and classism of New Orleans three years post-Katrina. Unearth its historical details of slavery, race relations, and the 1853 yellow fever epidemic.
A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts by Ying Chang Compestine (Holt, 2009; Gr 6-9) sets out a feast of eight short stories. In the Chinese tradition, food is left outside to appease hungry ghosts bent on revenge. These hungry ghost tales, most set in modern China, stir together butcher shops, iPods, fireworks, cell phones, traditional medicine, the Internet, Buddhist monasteries, Communist officials, the Great Wall, and enough gore to keep teen readers squirming. In “Tofu with Chili-Garlic Sauce,” a neurosurgeon botches a delicate brain operation before attending a feast where he eats live monkey brains. “When the monkey’s eyes popped open, Dr. Zhou nearly jumped out of his skin.” His dead patient’s ghost drives him mad until he submits to brain surgery, which is botched, of course. In the gruesomely entertaining “Jasmine Almond Cookies,” set in New York City’s Chinatown, a grieving family leaves succulent food on their son’s grave only to receive critical letters from his ghost in this insightful intersection of ancient traditions and contemporary culture. Seasoned with ghostly irony, this banquet is sure to satisfy readers.
The Awful Apocalypse
“[W]ithout the keys, something terrible will happen. Something that cannot be undone. If Alice and I are on conflicting sides of the prophecy, the keys would almost certainly be dangerous in her hands, which means I have to find them.” On the day she buries her father, the strange circular mark of a snake eating its own tail appears on Lia’s wrist, in Michelle Zink’s Prophecy of the Sisters (Little, Brown, 2009; Gr 7 Up), a gothic tale set in 1890 upstate New York. Soon the 16-year-old is locked in a struggle with her twin Alice, to end the family curse that has pitted generations of sisters against each other. If fulfilled, the prophecy would unleash utter satanic chaos in the world. Lia follows the cryptic clues of the ancient prediction with the aid of spiritualists, séances, and out-of-body travel, narrating in a proper Victorian voice perfect for this intense, darkly mystical story that explores the roles of fate, chance, and reason in the characters’ lives.
In Carrie Ryan’s post-apocalyptic The Forest of Hands and Teeth (Random House, 2009; Gr 9 Up), Mary lives in a remote village enclosed by chain-link fence that keeps the moaning, lurching zombie hordes out. When her mother is bitten by one of the Unconsecrated and is expelled, Mary is forced to join the Sisterhood, a religious order of stern women who rule the village. As she begins to realize the truth behind the Sisters’ “protection,” Mary spots a new, super-fast zombie wearing a red vest in the surrounding Forest of Hands and Teeth. “The red flashes again and then comes near me. She is at the fence now, with the others. And it’s clear from looking at her that she is Unconsecrated. Her limbs don’t work as if of one body and her skin stretches tight over her frame, as if the bones on her face could punch through at any moment.” When the Unconsecrated breach the fences and overrun the village, Mary escapes with five others, fleeing through the forest in search of safety and encountering peril at every turn. Mary’s detached, often pensive narration makes the graphic, gory details all the more biting in a complex story of isolation, longing, perseverance, and survival that ends with a glimmer of hope.
Crossing Forbidden Boundaries
“The…wolf whistled pitifully through his nostrils. I just kept staring at those eyes. Hazel. Did wolves have hazel eyes? Maybe they did. Why did they look so wrong? As I stared at them, that one word just kept singing through my head: human, human, human.” Attacked at age 10 by a pack of wolves, Grace became obsessed with the wolf that dragged her to safety, in Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver (Scholastic, 2009; Gr 9 Up). Now 17, she rescues Sam, an injured young man with yellow eyes, realizing that he is that creature—the werewolf who saved her. No phases of the moon or silver bullets here—Stiefvater’s re-imagined werewolves require youth and heat to remain human. The narration shifts seamlessly between Grace and Sam’s strong voices, tension rising within their romance as Sam is doomed to soon change into a wolf forever. Discussion and creative writing prompts abound, such as Sam’s descriptions of his merged wolf/human senses and vulnerabilities, and his reliance on sound and smell. Ethical dilemmas arise when Beck, the werewolves’ leader, recruits children to join the pack. Set in a frigid Minnesota winter, Shiver trembles with tenderness and shudders with dread.
The rumors are rampant—perform a little ritual, say “Tall Jake, take me away!” six times, and disappear into the evil comic book world of Malice. Intrigued, Luke chants the words, vanishes, and turns up dead in the pages of the next issue, in Chris Wooding’s Malice (Scholastic, October 2009; Gr 6-10), illustrated by Dan Chernett. Investigating Luke’s disappearance, Seth and Kady find themselves caught in a deadly and diabolical game. Entering Malice, Seth survives a nasty brush with Chitters, machines that suck the “time” out of trapped teens, and embarks on a quest to defeat Tall Jake and his demonic agents. Watching what is happening to Seth through the comics, Kady pursues him just in time to prevent his grisly death. The darkly creative world of Malice uses machines to depict evil, from the Menagerie filled with mechanical animals to the dangerous gears of the Clock Tower. Graphic novel passages take readers into the dark heart of the cult comic’s world. Compare Malice to Alice in Wonderland, and consider its themes of friendship, courage, peril, and adventure. “Malice was terrifying and wonderful. Some would look at it and call it a nightmare, but Seth saw a frontier, the only New World he could ever hope to have.”
Wickedly Wacky
Kelly Link keeps readers wonderfully off-kilter in her collection Pretty Monsters: Stories (Viking, 2008; Gr 9 Up). Deft use of irony, dry humor, and a detached tone render eerie happenings and macabre creatures believably entertaining. In “The Wrong Grave,” Miles digs up his girlfriend’s casket to retrieve poetry he buried with her, but finds another body there instead. “‘Look,’ Miles said, ‘I checked the tombstone and everything. This is supposed to be Bethany’s grave. Bethany Baldwin. I’m really sorry I bothered you and everything, but this isn’t really my fault.’ The dead girl just stared at him thoughtfully. He wished that she would blink.” In “Magic for Beginners,” Jeremy Mars, obsessed with an indie cult TV show, rescues its main character by stealing books from an Iowa library and leaving them in a Las Vegas phone booth. Two precocious little girls and their decidedly undead babysitter play a charmingly devilish game in “The Specialist’s Hat.” Link’s quirky portrayal of the grotesque mingles realistic teen characters with wizards, werewolves, and a purse containing a faery village, making for frighteningly delightful tales.
Tap into a little terror for can’t-put-it-down fall reading!
