Top 10 Los Gatos Library Teen Horror Reads

—Submitted by Los Gatos Librarian Henry Bankhead

1. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan

When the fence that surrounds her village and protects its residents from the Forest of Hands and Teeth is breached, danger strikes the only home Mary has ever known and forces her to decide between saving everything she loves or pursuing the life she has always dreamed of having.

2. Monster Island: a zombie novel, David Wellington

One month after the most developed nations of the world fall victim to a global zombie plague, Gary Fleck, a New York City zombie who has retained his intelligence among a sea of mindless fellow victims, plots to destroy the rest of humanity, while on the other side of the planet, a sixteen-year-old student prepares to save her endangered peers. Original.

3. Evernight, Claudia Gray

While attending Evernight Academy, a school for vampires, Bianca is certain that she is different from the rest, but when she falls hard for an outsider who eventually reveals that he is a vampire hunter out to destroy her kind, Bianca must decide where her loyalties lie.

4. The Marbury lens, Andrew Smith

After being kidnapped and barely escaping, 16-year-old Jack goes to London with his best friend Connor, where someone gives him a pair of glasses that send him to an alternate universe where war is raging, he is responsible for the survival of two younger boys, and Connor is trying to kill them all.

5. Solitary, Alexander Gordon Smith

Imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, fourteen-year-old Alex Sawyer thinks that he has escaped the hellish Furnace Penitentiary, but instead he winds up in solitary confinement, where new horrors await him.

6. The waking: dreams of the dead, Thomas Randall

After her mother dies, sixteen-year-old Kara and her father move to Japan, where he teaches and she attends school, but she is haunted by a series of frightening nightmares and deaths that might be revenge--or something worse.

7. Anna dressed in blood, Kendare Blake

For three years, seventeen-year-old Cas Lowood has carried on his father's work of dispatching the murderous dead, traveling with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat, but everything changes when he meets Anna, a girl unlike any ghost he has faced before.

8. Unwind, Neal Shusterman

In a future world where those between the ages of thirteen and eighteen can have their lives "unwound" and their body parts harvested for use by others, three teens go to extreme lengths to uphold their beliefs--and, perhaps, save their own lives.

9. The knife of never letting go, Patrick Ness

Todd and Viola are pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron as they set out across New World, searching for answers about their colony's true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing settlers from Old World.

10. The monstrumologist: William James Henry, Richard Yancey

As an apprentice to a monster-hunting doctor in 1888, Will Henry and his boss are brought a corpse entwined with an Anthropophagus--a supposedly extinct monster that feeds through teeth in its chest--and the two must race to stop it and its kind from consuming the world.