Haunted Houses, Haunted Jungles, Killer Proms, and More. Must be The Fright Stuff.

Proms are supposed to be fun, right? Fancy dresses, one last hurrah before graduation, all that high school jazz. But wow, the horror genre just does NOT agree! We have a whole tradition of stories best referred to as “proms you definitely don’t want to attend.” And Tiffany D. Jackson’s retelling of Carrie is a brilliant new addition to that long, violent, frequently bloody history. So hold on to your plastic tiaras, folks! Madison has been passing for white her whole life, on the insistence of her abusive father. But when she is revealed to be biracial, the bullying that normally plagues Maddy’s high school existence goes from bad to worse. The ensuing public fallout of a bullying video gone viral has the student body scrambling to repair their school’s reputation, but their plan for an integrated prom won’t be the solution they expect it to be. Not when Maddy’s classmates have decided that she still has to pay for her lies. Not when Maddy still has one secret left to to hide.

Ophie’s Ghosts is a middle grade historical horror book about grief, and how our lives — and maybe even our afterlives — can be haunted by the things we’ve done or the things that were done to us. Ophie and her mother lost every thing in a single night in November 1922. The night Ophie’s father died, and Ophie learned that she had the ability to see ghosts moving through the world around her. After that night, Ophie’s mother moved them to Pittsburgh and got Ophie a job working with her in a creepy old manor house. Like many old houses, Daffodil Manor is (un)alive with the ghosts of its long and not always happy history. As Ophie gets to know the ghosts, and even befriends one, she begins to realize that her gift might actually let her help the ghosts of Daffodil Manor. But houses that old don’t just have ghosts, they also have secrets, and those secrets may run deeper than Ophie knows.

Megan Giddings is the author of hard hitting social horror books, and her newest is only further testament to her skill. An innovative variation on witchcraft and magic, The Women Could Fly is about a future in which witches are real, and the State will do anything it can to stop them. Any woman is susceptible to becoming a witch, which means that every woman has to be meticulously controlled. Women are “encouraged” to marry by age 30 and put themselves in the care of a husband who can “help” them stay good. At 28, as a Black women and the daughter of a suspected witch, Jo is already feeling the pressure to conform to the State’s demands when a new version of her missing mother’s will suddenly comes to light. What it asks of Jo is strange, and will likely subject her to even closer scrutiny from the State, but Jo will have to risk being declared a witch if she wants to find out what really happened to her mother.

If you prefer your horror with a side of humor, you should definitely be reading Lily Anderson. She married the two perfectly in Undead Girl Gang, and came back for another round with her 2022 book. Scout’s Honor is about an organization called the Ladybird Scouts, who disguise themselves as a proper ladies’ society when in fact they’re trained monster hunters sworn to protect humanity. Prue is a legacy Scout, descended form a long family history of hunters. Their prey? Mulligrubs — weird inter-dimensional parasitic monsters who feast on human emotion. Prue walked away from the Scouts when her best friend was killed in a hunt, and she has no intention of returning, but monster slayer is in her blood, and when a heist-esque plan to infiltrate the Ladybirds goes seriously sideways, she finds herself left with only one choice: in order to save her town and everyone she loves, she’ll finally have to confront that past she’s been running from for three long years.