Weekly YA Explorations: SCARY BOOKS! 👻🧟

 Weekly YA Explorations: SCARY BOOKS! 👻🧟

I was looking forward to this week. I enjoy some horror fiction here and there, as long as it keeps things light and there's a fun supernatural element in the mix. I'm grateful that I read Dread Nation, as it seems some of my other classmate's books were about kids in scary situations which is not for me. I'll take some zombies to separate me from the heavy stuff, thank you very much. 

Deathless Divide, by Justina Ireland, is the sequel to Dread Nation, and it sees Jane and Katherine departing the crumbling Summerland for California. It seems she can't leave it all behind though, as the the trauma of Summerland haunts her on the road to the golden west. Judging from the snippet I read, it seems as though the people of Jane's past still haunt her, too. (Miss Anderson is back!) While I enjoyed reading Dread Nation this week, it did feel at times like the book did a lot of work to set up the sequel, at the expense of the satisfaction of the reader still on the first book. So I hope Deathless Divide delivers! I'd really like to learn more about the young women at the heart of this story, Jane and Katherine. While we got to know Jane a bit, I'd like to know more about her past and how it shaped her. Katherine is, I think, particularly interesting as she wears a bit of a mask and we didn't get to really see behind it too much in the first book. It seems this book is also told from Katherine's POV, so it would be cool to see how her memories of the young women's time at Miss Preston's and in Summerland differ. I really enjoyed the contemplation of racism, colorism, and misogyny present in Dread Nation and I thought the allegory of an impossible to contain, brainless horde was a pretty apt choice so I am interested to see how it develops in Deathless Divide. Learn more about Deathless Divide here. 

The next choice is being made into a movie. I kept thinking that Dread Nation should really be a mini-series; I think it would translate to the screen very well. 

There's Someone Inside Your House, by Stephanie Perkins, originally piqued my interest because it has a cool cover. Yes, yes, don't judge a book, etc. etc. but we all do it! The book features a young woman who moves from Hawaii to rural Nebraska, and her friends and classmates start being brutally murdered. After reading the jacket description it seemed like a fairly standard, teen slasher horror fiction story, and I put it down and went home. When I started researching what people were saying about it, however, I saw that it was very hotly debated in the YA community. The online response to There's Someone In Your House has it all: librarians writing blog posts about the need to stop revoking people's "horror fan" card for liking this book; a GoodReads reviewer who only reads "black list" books and liked it; a reviewer who appreciated it for it's representation and inclusion of a football player with CTE. It was all over the place! What I can glean from these online responses is that the author usually writes romance, and many people seemed to appreciate that aspect of the book, but people were generally unimpressed with the horror/slasher/scary elements. There seems to be no shortage of YA murder mystery type books, so in a crowded field, a writer might have to really know what she's doing and bring something unique to the table to stand out. All that said, There's Someone Inside Your House is being made into a Netflix movie, so Perkins must have done something right! Learn more about this book here. 

After reading mixed reviews of a teen slasher book, I wanted to check out some more creature based horror like Dread Nation. Fractured Tide, by Leslie Lutz, is a book about a sea monster which I think, in the pantheon of horrifying creatures, is under appreciated. The book centers on Sia, a 17 year old who grew up in the water, taking tourists on scuba driving trips to look at old ship wrecks. On one such trip, Sia's boat is attacked, her customers are killed, and she ends up alone (or so she thinks) on a deserted island. One common theme that I always see mentioned in YA descriptions is that the main characters are often "haunted by their past". For such young people, these kids seem to have a lot of burdensome pasts! It makes sense, of course, when you consider how much of one's teenage life is spent trying to figure out who they are, who they were, and who they are becoming. A deserted island, with a horrifying monster waiting in the water, the jungle pressing upon your back, and a bunch of mysterious people milling around seems like the perfect pressure cooker environment to figure out deep truths about yourself. Fractured Tide is told through journal entries. This style of writing works particularly well for horror, I think, as it lends itself well to slow building dread and confusion. Just think of how well the missives work in Dracula. Find out more about Fractured Tide here.