Wayland YA Booklists: Horror & Thrillers

Against his better judgment, fifth grader Griffin Birch follows his best friend down the new slide in the school playground, and at the other end of this portal they discover a cruel world populated by bloodthirsty creatures on a quest to become immortal.

"Riley Flynn is alone. It feels like she's been on her own since sixth grade, when her best friend, Emily, ditched her for the cool girls. Girls who don't like Riley. Girls who decide one day to lock her in the science closet after hours, after everyone else has gone home. When Riley is finally able to escape, however, she finds that her horror story is only just beginning. All the school doors are locked, the windows won't budge, the phones are...

"Maybe Archie Coomes has been watching too many horror movies. 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 ax 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...

"Esther Gold loves Halloween more than anything in the world. So she is determined to go trick-or-treating again this year despite the fact that her parents think she is officially too old...But when the night rolls around, something feels . . . off. No one is answering their door. The moon is an unnatural shade of orange. Strange children wander the streets, wearing creepy costumes that might not be costumes at all"--Provided by publisher.

"When eleven-year-old Sol arrives at the Ash House, desperate for a cure for his complex pain syndrome, he finds a community of strange children long abandoned by their mysterious Headmaster. The children at the Ash House want the new boy to love their home as much as they do. They give him a name like theirs. They show him the dorms and tell him about the wonderful oasis that the Headmaster has created for them. But the new boy already has a name....

"Noe Wiley couldn't be more excited to move. After the slumber party sleepwalking incident of last year, she's ready to make some new friends. But Noe didn't expect the sullen, strange girls who live on her new street. And she certainly didn't expect the strange warning they give her--to stay out of her basement, no matter what. Noe's not going to let these girls boss her around. She'll go in her own basement whenever she wants. So she does. And there...

Ever since her near-fatal drowning, Cassidy has been able to pull back the "veil" that separates the living from the dead and see ghosts. Her best friend is even a ghost. So things are already pretty strange. But they're about to get much stranger. When Cass' parents start hosting a TV show about the world's most haunted places, the family heads off to Edinburgh, Scotland. Here, graveyards, castles and secret passageways teem with restless phantoms....

Looking for excitement, Coraline ventures through a mysterious door into a world that is similar, yet disturbingly different from her own, where she must challenge a gruesome entity in order to save herself, her parents, and the souls of three others.

"After a monster apocalypse hits town, average thirteen-year-old Jack Sullivan builds a team of friends to help slay the eerily intelligent monster known as Blarg"--

"Three tweens with unique talents must team up to battle prehistoric zombifying monsters taking over a spooky mansion"--