Neighbors. We’ve all got ‘em, right? We believe we’re the good ones, and we pray we don’t live next door to the bad ones… but sometimes it’s inevitable that we share our property lines with those ill-suited for neighborly behavior. Horror books about bad neighbors are the perfect window into our own communities. We can peer into the lives of others without worry of getting caught. We can tiptoe through their rooms and rummage through their drawers… Who knows what we might find. Are they witches? Serial killers? Devil worshippers? Only their dirty laundry will tell.
So few books give me chills, but I could feel my temperature downright drop the deeper into this graphic novel I went. Certainly not for the weak-hearted, or stomached for that matter, Powell and Schechter plunge into one of the most depraved characters of the Midwest… none other than Ed Gein himself. There is an odd beauty to the madness at display here. It just goes to show you never know what’s going on behind the closed doors of your next-door neighbors.
“It is fantastic! Not only is Eric Powell's art on point, but Harold Schechter introduces some new ideas about Ed Gein that have never been heard.” - THE LAST PODCAST ON THE LEFT
“A natural choice for true-crime fans.”―BOOKLIST
“As extensively researched as the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell Jack the Ripper graphic novel From Hell, ”Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?” is a masterpiece of the form, standing as the best possible dramatization of Ed Gein's tale in any medium.”―BLOODY DISGUSTING
“This is a new true crime comics essential.”―SYFY WIRE
There’s nothing better than sitting down at the pool to read a fun, engaging story that transports you into another world and keeps you entertained. I’ve always loved reading to escape, and when I started writing and posting my stories for free online at 17 years old, I discovered my true calling. My first story amassed 140 million reads with millions of comments, where people shared how much fun they had reading the story and how it helped them escape from their lives. Since then, I’ve continued writing stories I’m passionate about and sharing them with people who love a good, fun, romance.
Not a big romance/romcom reader? No worries, Never Coming Home is the perfect poolside book for you.
This
summer YA mystery/thriller follows a group of teen influencers who are
invited to a hot new exclusive island, but everyone’s hiding secrets,
and then people start dying. I enjoyed this book as a poolside summer
read because it’s so fast-paced and intriguing that I was sucked right
into the story.
It’s a summer slasher read full of twists and
perfectly unlikeable characters that kept me turning pages until it was
done in one sitting.
The escapist read you have been dying for! When ten of America’s hottest teenage influencers are invited to an exclusive island resort, things are sure to get wild. But murder isn't what anyone expected. Will anyone survive?
Everyone knows Unknown Island—it’s the world’s most exclusive destination. Think white sand beaches, turquoise seas, and luxury accommodations. Plus, it’s invite only, no one over twenty-one is allowed, and it’s absolutely free. Who wouldn’t want to go?
The mysterious resort launched with a viral marketing campaign, and now the whole world is watching as Unknown Island opens its doors to the First Ten,…
"A haunting YA mystery. Touching on everything from police ineptitude and community solidarity to the endless frustration of being patronized as a young person, this paranormal thriller confidently combines timely and relatable themes within a page-turning storyline." - Self-Publishing Review
"Biel's writing is fast-paced and sharp!" - author Christy Wopat…
I’m a writer with a passion for nature and the great outdoors. As a child, my family vacations centered around camping in various locations around the U.S. We spent plenty of time hiking, swimming, exploring caves, and sitting around a campfire. My mom and I also frequently camped with our horses, sometimes even sleeping in the back of our horse trailer. Those are some of the best memories of my life. To this day, my family and I still enjoy exploring the great outdoors. Some of our favorite destinations include the Grand Canyon, the beaches of Key West, the Pacific Northwest, the Redwood forests, and Yellowstone National Park.
I found this book by chance and wanted to read it because the premise is similar to one of my projects. The Wild is a murder mystery set at a camp for juvenile delinquents. This story takes place in the Pacific Northwest, which was a big bonus for me as it’s one of my favorite places on Earth.
I liked the author’s unique and snappy writing style and the fast pacing of the book. It kept me turning pages, especially once the first murder occurred. Overall, this book was a lot of fun to read.
A girl is sent against her will to a remote wilderness boot camp where things aren't what they seem in this riveting and twisty paperback thriller.
FROM THIS MOMENT ON, YOU'RE A BEAR CUB. YOU'LL LEARN RESPONSIBILITY AND RESPECT. HOW TO SURVIVE. IT'S EASIER IF YOU JUST ACCEPT IT.
Dawn isn't a bad person--she's just made some bad choices: wrong guy, wrong friends, wrong everything. But she wasn't expecting her parents to pay a boatload of money to ship her off to OUT OF THE WILD, a wilderness boot camp with a bunch of other messed up kids to learn…
I'm a full-time author and freelance editor from a small Canadian city, and I’ve always been fascinated by a good mystery—flipping through the pages, trying to guess who did or didn’t do it. Dark and gritty are my favorites, and the titles on this list do a good job of staying in that realm while still being very much YA. I hope you love them as much as I did!
This is a dual-timeline murder mystery from a unique perspective. Without giving away too many spoilers, this story follows Clara, whose sister has been accused of murdering Griffin Tomlin—the “golden boy” who Clara once had a crush on.
There is a lot to unpack here, and the dual-timeline makes it a fascinating read; piece-by-piece, we slowly learn Clara’s past with Griffin leading up to the events of him being allegedly murdered by her sister. Why would Clara’s sister do such a thing? And was Griffin Tomlin really the “golden boy” he seemed to be? This story gets dark, and as a fair warning, sometimes graphic—but if that sounds like a good read for you, I’d definitely pick it up!
Sometimes the lies we’re told are nowhere near as deadly as the lies we tell ourselves . . .
Four months after the murder of golden-boy Griffin Tomlin, the entire town of Shiloh is still in shock. For Clara Porterfield, the world has crumbled into a million chaotic pieces.
At home, her sister awaits trial for Griffin’s murder, her mother obsessively digs in a dead garden, and her father lives in perpetual denial.
At school, Clara is haunted by her classmates’ morbid stares and the unspoken questions they are too afraid to ask.
I am a lover of ghosts, historical murders, and all things spooky. I am also the author of eight YA novels, including two YA horror novels, Small Town Monsters and Hatchet Girls. Being half Puerto Rican, I try to lend my culture to my characters. Historically, the horror genre has been dominated by white male authors. And while I love their work, Stephen King is a master, I'm excited that women and POC writers are finally getting their stories told. What scares women is often very different from what scares men, same with people of color, and by releasing more diverse stories, like mine, we add ways to frighten new fans.
This YA Horror novel is technically the sequel to Cardinal’s smash hit Five Midnights, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, but I liked it even more than the original.
Category Five takes place in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, and it dives into the real-life struggle with real estate developers trying to gobble up cheap, devasted properties. It also exposes the ghostly history left on nearby Vieques Island after the last Cat 5 storm that hit way back in 1926.
The book features a mixture of spooky and historical with an endearing cast of found family that make it a quick, fun read.
Category Five is a new supernatural YA thriller from Ann Dávila Cardinal, set against the backdrop of a post-hurricane Puerto Rico.
After the hurricane, some see destruction and some smell blood.
The tiny island of Vieques, located just off the northeastern coast of the main island of Puerto Rico, is trying to recover after hurricane Maria, but the already battered island is now half empty. To make matters worse, as on the main island, developers have come in to buy up the land at a fraction of its worth, taking advantage of the island when it is down.
I’m a BIG reader of mysteries and thrillers, but I hate it when you read a thriller and guess who did it on page 20, or it turns out it’s a character so obscure you could never have guessed it! But it’s easy to criticize! I’ve wanted to write a young adult thriller since I was young, and over the last few years, I found myself more able to try. For me, writing my book was like running a marathon…I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but now I’m really happy that I did!
This book by Barry Lyga absolutely captivated me with its intense, dark narrative.
The story centers around Jasper "Jazz" Dent, who grew up as the son of the country’s most notorious serial killer. (Talk about a family tree!) Having been exposed to gruesome lessons in murder from a very young age, Jazz is haunted by the fear that he might follow in his father’s footsteps.
It helps explore the terrifying notion of nature versus nurture. Jazz’s battle with his own potential for evil is chilling, and it makes the read not just a thriller but a deep dive into his fight for a normal life. As bodies start appearing in Jazz's small town, he recognizes patterns that match his father’s killings, and so he starts to help the police. The pacing is superb, intertwining Jazz’s personal demons with a gripping murder investigation.
What if the world's worst serial killer...was your dad? Jasper (Jazz) Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say. But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could - from the criminal's point of view. And now bodies are piling up in Lobo's Nod. In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer but Jazz has a secret--could he be more…
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can…
As an academic, I have been researching Canadian police and criminal justice history since the 1980s and I teach courses on the history of policing, crime, drugs and homicide, and capital punishment. In 2014 I began to cover a high-profile murder trial in my region of Canada and ended up writing a best-selling book on the case. The Oland case reinforced my interest in true crime, both as a research topic and a cultural phenomenon. True crime, whether set in the distant past or contemporary times, offers writers and readers alike fascinating forays into specific societies and communities as well as human nature.
Similar to my second choice, this American study explores the impact of a sensational unsolved death on early Victorian New York and America in general. In 1841 Marie Rogers, an attractive young woman who worked in a tobacco shop, was found dead in the Hudson River, suspected to be a victim of murder. The case was well covered in the press and exposed weaknesses in the city’s system of policing. The author details how Edgar Allen Poe furthered early detective fiction in his story The Mystery Marie Roger, which although set in Paris borrowed heavily from the New York events. An example of how the public can make a celebrity out of a murder victim who is not from the elite.
On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar girl, was found floating in the Hudson-and New York's unregulated police force proved incapable of solving the crime. One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rogt."
There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.
The first of the Virgil Flowers novels, which is an offshoot of the (also spectacular) Lucas Davenport series. The story follows BCA investigator Virgil Flowers through the Minnesota backwoods as he works an arson/murder case. This book is different from a few of the others on this list in that it isn’t going to ruin you emotionally. It’s funny. Hell, its just fun. The hero is a well-meaning horndog who regularly forgets to bring his gun to work. The case is twisty and satisfying and the characters are so well fleshed out that when it’s over you just want to pick up your phone and invite them out for a burger. I eat this series like candy.
The first Virgil Flowers novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.
"Virgil Flowers, introduced in bestseller Sandford's Prey series, gets a chance to shine...The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), who reports to Prey series hero Lucas Davenport, operates pretty much on his own.."*
He's been doing the hard stuff for three years, but he's never seen anything like this. In the small rural town of Bluestem, an old man is bound in his basement, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Three weeks before, a doctor and his wife were murdered.…
I loved spending time with these unique characters in this world that I knew so little about. Sepetys's historical research is top-notch without ever overshadowing the story.
Out of the Easy is set against the vivid backdrop of 1950s New Orleans. Written by New York Times bestselling author Ruth Sepetys, this novel has something for everyone: love, mystery, murder, blackmail and warmth.
Josie Moraine wants out of The Big Easy - she needs more than New Orleans can offer. Known locally as a brothel prostitute's daughter, she dreams of life at an elite college, far away from here.
But then a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie caught between her ambition and a clandestine underworld. New Orleans is luring Josie deeper in as she searches for…
Rich boarding school meets murder mystery in Jesse Q. Sutanto’s The
New Girl—except main character Lia Setiawan is anything but wealthy, and we
already know she’s the killer.
It was an accident, but that doesn’t stop her
from worrying about going to prison for her teacher’s murder as the detectives
circle the drain. I laughed out loud so many times while I flew through this
book, the question of whether she’d get caught ripping me to shreds in
anticipation.
There are no spoilers here, but I’ll tell you it’s worth the wild
ride.
Lia Setiawan has never really fit in. And when she wins a full ride to the prestigious Draycott Academy on a track scholarship, she's determined to make it work even though she's never felt more out of place. But on her first day there she witnesses a girl being forcefully carried away by campus security. Her new schoolmates and teachers seem unphased, but it leaves her unsure of what she's gotten herself into. And as she uncovers the secrets of Draycott, complete with a corrupt teacher, a golden boy who isn't what he seems, and a blackmailer determined to get…
