YA Bram Stoker Award Ginger Nuts of Horror breaks down the 2023 Preliminary List.
For the last few years Young Blood, the YA section of Ginger Nuts of Horror, traditionally reviews all the books on the YA Bram Stoker Preliminary Ballot. Six of the ten for 2023/4 had already appeared on the site, so I only had another four to track down. It was a solid Preliminary Ballot; however, it lacks any true bangers and a couple of inclusions which barely qualified as horror. Considering the number of great books which were released in 2023 I’m scratching my head over why two or three of these ended up on a horror ballot.
YA horror does not begin and end in the USA. So it was exceptionally disappointing to see an almost entirely (one author was American/Vietnamese) list from the USA. The UK has a thriving YA horror scene, so it is saddening to see it neglected once again. Perhaps the HWA need to recategorize this Award as ‘American only’ as nobody else gets a look in.
As this list does feature some very mediocre titles which I do not believe reflect the ‘best’ in YA dark fiction and horror, Ginger Nuts of Horror will be releasing its own ‘Alternative Ginger Nut Stoker Top 20 For 2023’ much closer to the final award ceremony. We will highlight all the great YA horror released in the UK (and other countries) from 2023 we have enjoyed the most.
However, there are still some decent novels featured here, including great LGBTQIA+ representation (five books) and two with Indigenous characters. Sadly there was only one novel with giant killer monsters, but there were two featuring computer games which would have been better suited on a science fiction list. And I’m not 100% certain the Chuck Tingle was genuinely a YA novel; the jury is still out on that one.
Here’s how I rated them:
Kalynn Bayron – You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight 7/10
Jennifer D Lyle – Swarm 7/10
Chuck Tingle – Camp Damascus 7/10
Cherie Dimaline – Funeral Songs for Dying Girls 7/10
Adam Sass – Your Lonely Nights Are Over 6/10
Trang Thanh Tran – She is a Haunting 6/10
Kristen Simmons – Find Him Where You Left Him Head 5/10
Sarah Hollowell – What Stalks Among Us 5/10
Charlene Allen – Play the Game 4/10
Cynthia Leitich Smith – Harvest House 4/10
The books are presented alphabetically by author.
Charlene Allen – Play the Game
I’m not sure how Charlene Allen’s Play the Game ended up on the Stoker ballot? This award is for YA horror novels and considering the great number of dark fiction titles published in 2023 I’m perplexed why a thriller with a racial and computer gaming theme is nominated above hundreds of more deserving and appropriate books. There is nothing wrong with Play the Game but I see little to gain in shoe-horning a teen drama thriller into a horror novel competition. The overarching theme of restorative justice is front and centre of Play the Game and the fallout which follows the murder of a Black teen. Restorative justice is an interesting concept which is often explored in YA but it is usually in dramas and rarely in horror.
The story begins four months after the main character’s best friend Ed is killed by a white man in a Brooklyn parking lot. When Singer, the man who killed Ed, is found dead in the same spot where Ed was murdered, VZ’s other best friend Jack is the prime suspect for the murder and VZ begins to investigate whilst in the background there is distrust of the police in the Black community and simmering racial tension. A large part of the novel revolves around VZ attempting to finish coding a fantasy adventure computer game set in New York, which Ed was working on when he died and was hoping to enter in a gaming competition. With the help of Diamond, a girl VZ crushes on, he restarts the game which may or may not have pointers connected to Singer and his death. Play the Game covers a lot of ground with engaging characters, a solid mystery and a convincing social commentary, but lacked any sense of horror. AGE RANGE 13+
Kalynn Bayron – You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight
Since Cinderella Is Dead arrived in 2020 Kalynn Bayron has made serious waves in the YA fantasy world, following that smash hit with This Poison Heart and sequel This Wicked Fate. This author always features great diversity and LGBTQIA+ representation, which continues in You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight with a Black gay teenage girl being the main character (although this is not a significant part of the story). In the acknowledgements Bayron notes that this novel is a tribute to all her favourite slasher films of the eighties and she has great fun playing around with the Final Girl trope. Younger readers might not notice many of the nuances or film references, but it remains a fun and enjoyable read and even thought it has some f-bombs any young teen will be sucked into a page-turner which really picks up the pace in the second half, with the first setting the scene.
Main character Charity Curtis loves her summer job playing a Final Girl at Camp Mirror Lake, where paying customers have the crap scared out of them in a location made famous by an old horror slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The game is incredibly realistic, full contact, and Charity is exceptionally good at it and gets a kick out of scaring people. The first half of the novel builds the tension, Charity’s girlfriend Bezi is another major character and after weird things begin to happen they realise the camp is not what it seems and has a history significantly older than the slasher movie they pay homage to. With real killers on the prowl, Charity’s Final Girl role becomes all too real and she has to fight for survival, with her camp role being well and truly reversed. Although it lacked genuine scares, there were some cool reveals towards the conclusion and an ending which would be go down well on the big screen. Charity was a great central character and I liked the way the novel did add in some social commentary regarding how the victims were chosen. Like the horror films which inspired it, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight was not an especially deep read, nor did it need to be, but it sure was a fun one. AGE RANGE 13/14+
Cherie Dimaline – Funeral Songs for Dying Girls
Cherie Dimaline has written a wide range of fiction for children, teens and adults and in the YA world is best known for her modern dystopian survival classic The Marrow Thieves (2017) in which the main characters are all Native Americans, which is often the case in her work. Native American characters and themes also feature in Funeral Songs for Dying Girls, but it by no means dominates a poignant coming of age love story, which has a supernatural slant. Apart from the fact one of the main characters is a ghost there is very little horror in this novel, as the book is more about the relationship between main character Winifred who meets the ghost Phil (Philomena) after being romantically spurned by her long-term best friend Jack. When Winifred turns sixteen she offers her virginity to Jack, who turns her down seeing her as a friend rather than an easy hook-up. This background story was great, centring upon how the two teenagers drift apart, more him than her, but can patch up their differences accepting that they will never be as close as they once were. But that was okay too.
Winifred lives beside Winterson Cemetery where her father works at the crematorium, which is under threat of closure. Winifred’s mother’s remains are stored there also and her father in a deep depression since her death, meanwhile the teen wanders around the graveyard at odd hours and is mistaken as a ghost. Her con-artist cousin leads local ghost tours and is keen to involve the cemetery into her repertoire until the real ghost appears. The story of Phil was both sad and moving, dying close to the cemetery around 1990, when she was fifteen and the developing friendship and relationship was one of the highlights of Funeral Songs for Dying Girls. It was very easy to forget that Phil was dead, as she was the least ‘ghostly’ ghost I had ever come across, however, she did have great musical taste. I loved the fact that the two girls could not agree on what music to listen to and played Neil Young’s Harvest Moon on repeat, as it was the only album they could agree on liking! This was a gentle novel about moving on, young love, letting go of the past, all delivered with a sensitive touch. AGE RANGE 13+
Sarah Hollowell – What Stalks Among Us
Sarah Hollowell’s What Stalks Among Us was a quirky and very well written intelligent story but ultimately it tested my patience. At almost 400-pages it started going around in circles around page 100 and I quickly became exasperated by the lack of progress, yet another dead end or a sequence I felt I had read before. However, within the context of the novel that might have been deliberate. The plot was reminiscent of something you might find within an old episode of the Twilight Zone TV show, with kids getting lost in a weird maze and not being able to find their way out facing unexplainable hurdles with time seemingly standing still. Not everything made sense, but I can’t go into details without heading into spoiler territory with some of the plot twists coming across more like plot holes. I also thought the nods towards diversity were merely tick boxing exercises, one character is described as being bisexual and it is never mentioned again or has any part in the plot, the other is of East Asian descent, again that’s the end of the conversation.
Best friends and high school seniors Sadie and Logan ditch their end-of-year field trip to the amusement park as Sadie might be too large for some of the rides (I also thought this was a weak excuse for avoiding school and highlighting the weight issue). And whilst out driving come across a giant, abandoned corn maze which they think will be a lot of fun. Big mistake, instead they find themselves trapped inside and find other people who have been there for years. Even worse, they find dead bodies of people who look like themselves and realise the maze is a giant trap which is impossible to escape and as time moves differently they realise this might not be their first rodeo in the maze. Even though What Stalks Among Us tested my patience it still had its moments, the familiar dead bodies were unsettling and the wind in the maze whispering “Sadie” was seriously creepy. I was also on the hook to see how things ended, which can be tricky in these types of books, but I found it very satisfying and even a little moving. AGE RANGE 13+
Jennifer Lyle – Swarm
Over the years I’ve read more than my fair share of creature features, for both adults and kids, but I think giant killer mutant (one to around two foot long) butterflies is a first! Swarm hits the ground incredibly fast, teenager Shur, who narrates in the first person, is daydreaming in school looking out the window and spots a HUGE butterfly. Shortly after the emergency sirens alarm, similar to an active shooter situation, all the kids head for the sports hall. Instead Shur and her twin brother Keene break away from the crowds with two other friends and grab their little brother before running home. What followed was a very quirky, atmospheric and restrained apocalyptic tale where most of the action takes place in the family home (with no adults present) with little information about what is going on outside. It quickly becomes apparent that these butterfly monsters are vicious and the group witness others being killed by the creatures. Slowly but surely the plot reveals more about the beasts and we realise that a bit could lead to horrific side effects and a clever variation on the zombie story.
Shur was a great lead character, suffering from severe anxiety she is balanced by her considerate brother Keene. Keene deserved his own narrative, YA horror is totally dominated by female voices, and considering they were twins and the story was predominately set in one location a second perspective might have broken the narrative up and we could have seen his sister’s anxiety attacks from the brother’s perspective. Even though it was a very creepy novel and there were lots of terrific scenes with the teens (I loved the two friends Jenny and Nathan) as the survival aspect to protect the house from predators increased blending into home invasion. Lurking in the background was further worry about where their absent mother was. Swarm was great character driven entertainment with the monsters giving the serious yuck effect, but it did end rather abruptly and I felt there more explanation might have been beneficial. AGE RANGE 13+
Adam Sass – Your Lonely Nights Are Over
Adam Sass’s Your Lonely Nights Are Over is an over-the-top riotous LGBTQIA+ celebration with a slasher horror vibe in which two gay teen best friends find their friendship tested when a serial killer starts targeting their school’s Queer Club. The novel is camp, chatty, uses lots of queer lingo with both Dearie and Cole (they both have their own narratives) engaging central characters. It was very nice to read a novel with a LGBTQIA+ vibe which wasn’t about ‘coming out’ as both Dearie and Cole were openly gay when the novel opens and as their role in the Queer Clubs shows, proud of it. The weakness of the story was its connection to a long since forgotten serial killer coming out of retirement to target their club, which seemed ridiculous and held limited credibility. Fifty years had passed and the killer would have needed a Zimmer-frame! Of course, there was no surprise in the big reveal and whether it truly was connected to the notorious ‘Mr Sandman’ returning to claim more victims.
Although Your Lonely Nights Are Over is played for laughs, there are enough deaths for it to be read by thriller fans, even if it touches on serious subjects such as queer loneliness, it might still be too light for some readers. Parts of the novel coincide with a docuseries about the original Mr Sandman murders and as the bodies pile up Dearie and Cole become suspects and bubbling in the background is the prejudices against them because they are gay. Although this is primary a murder mystery about gay friendships it also touches on many other subjects such as abusive relationships, racism, homophobia, gaslighting and emotional manipulation. Cole is also Latino and has to deal with being a person of colour in a predominately white high school. It was also great that the story was not really about a romance as the two were not destined to be together and if you are a fan of nineties slasher films then there is a lot of fun to be had. It is unlikely you will get too invested in who the murderer is (almost incidental) enjoy the chaos and banter instead. AGE RANGE 13+
Kristen Simmons – Find Him Where You Left Him Dead
I had not read Kristen Simmons for a decade, since her excellent dystopian Article Five trilogy (2012-14) so was happy to read Find Him Where You Left Him Dead which Kendare Blake has said was “Jumanji but Japanese-inspired”. Blake’s assessment is a fairly accurate one and it has a computer game feel to it (with the characters completing levels) and like many computer games it got repetitive and the horror action sections were too similar. The basic concept of the novel is also derivative of Lois Duncan’s classic I Know What You Did Last Summer as the four former best friends the story is built around cover up the disappearance of their best friend four years earlier. As Ian ends up getting trapped in a game which transports him to another dimension then Owen, Madeline, Emerson, and Dax cannot exactly tell the truth to the police.
The novel has a great opening, a ghostly vision of Ian starts appearing to his former best friends who reunite when they realise he might not be dead. Together they return to the place where their friendship ended with one goal: find Ian and bring him home. So they restart the deadly game they never finished, an innocent card-matching challenge called Meido. Much of the book concerns the tense friction and guilt between the teens, also four split narratives, who have followed completely different paths since they abandoned Ian. The setting for their challenges was a threatening (but still cool version) of a creepy Japanese underworld, even if many of the creatures they faced did not really hold much fear or went much beyond the light Jumanji level of fear. The four have one night to complete seven challenges or they’ll all be stuck in this world forever. The Japanese references were interesting, but never really went full in and if that catches your attention then check out Courtney Alameda’s Seven Deadly Shadows (2020). This was a solid read but never truly captivated me. AGE RANGE 13+
Cynthia Leitich Smith – Harvest House
In regard to being nominated Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Harvest House suffers from the same problem as Charlene Allen’s Play the Game and Kristen Simmon’s Find Him Where You Left Dead, there is just not enough horror in this book to justify its place on the ballot. In fact, the supernatural element of the story is particularly weak and it might have been a stronger novel if it had been a straight high-school drama, as that part of the story was nicely handled. Proceedings open with high school drama star main character Hughie Wolfe finding out that the next big production has been cut due to a lack of funding. Hughie is devastated as he lives for the school productions and does not know how he will survive until spring. Early in the action we are given a countdown ’51 Days to Halloween’ and so on, this must be the most boring and pointless countdown I have ever come across in teen fiction as it leads to a huge anticlimax of absolutely nothing. To fill his time, Hughie ends up working for Harvest House, which is going to be putting on a scary show for Halloween, and as there is no school production. For Hughie working on this is better than nothing.
The serious message of Harvest House was much more interesting than the supernatural story which seemed shoehorned into the narrative which doubles back to a disappearance of a teenage girl from the eighties. Hughie is also a Native American and is proud of his heritage and has stood up against cultural misappropriation in the past and is concerned that the scares in the Halloween extravaganza will be at the expense of his own heritage. The author’s endnotes regarding well-used Hollywood tropes, such at the cursed Indian burial ground (think Pet Sematary – it’s forty years old now and I wonder how well it would be received if released in 2024?) add some excellent points about this. As a teen novel Harvest House was an engaging read and I enjoyed spending time with Hughie and those around him. However, as a horror novel or work of dark fiction it was weak. It is all very well having a serious message in your fiction, but you need the plot to carry it off and some scares along the way. AGE RANGE 12/13+
Chuck Tingle – Camp Damascus
If you drop the name Chuck Tingle into Google or Amazon you will be presented with a wild list of over-the-top LGBTQIA+ titles which are clearly not suitable for a school library. Camp Damascus might be a perfect read for teens who are struggling with their sexuality or with coming out or problems to their parents. It is not explicit in any sexual sense and even though there is some body horror towards the end I would happily recommend it to older teens. The backdrop to the story concerns the world’s most effective gay conversion camp, which is nestled in the Montana wilderness, where parents from around the world send their children to experience the program’s 100% success rate. It takes it’s time getting around to why the program is so successful, but it is pretty wild and dives deep into the realms of supernatural horror. In the UK there is ongoing legislation to outlaw this type of therapy, which to say it is frowned upon is an understatement, so it was fascinating to read a novel which (kind of) gives the inside track.
Rose Darling is a classic unreliable narrator and early in the novel, whilst having dinner with her parents, Rose begins to vomit insects and her family are strangely unperturbed. When she returns to her bedroom she notices her door has been removed from its hinges, or was it always like that? The reader is not sure either way. We realise that Rose attends an Evangelical Christian Church, she drops hints and clues as the story moves on and the reader realises it might even be a sect or a cult. Rose begins to see things; thinks she is being haunted by a demon and has strange feelings for another girl. But being gay and a member of this church is forbidden, but nightmares blend with memories and all roads lead back to Camp Damascus, where she has never been (or has she?) I enjoyed this book a lot and ultimately it is about young queer people facing and conquering their inner demons, some readers might have preferred slightly more restraint with the supernatural element and over-the-top ending, but it was still a wildly enjoyable romp. AGE RANGE 14+
Trang Thanh Tran – She Is a Haunting
She Is a Haunting is a fascinating novel aimed at older teens which I enjoyed in patches but found frustrating in others. The narrator is seventeen-year-old Jade Nguyen, who is American Vietnamese, with much of the story dealing with her internal conflict over how she sees herself. She does not speak fluent Vietnamese and when she visits the home of her family for the summer feels disconnected and less than. As the same time she has been hiding the fact that she is bisexual from her family and is particularly concerned how her mother will react when she finds out. So even before we get to the supernatural element, the story has a major focus on Jade, who is also struggling with a messy relationship she left behind in America with another girl. Combine all these factors together and She Is a Haunting becomes a very angsty book, maybe too much so, which some readers might find a touch frustrating. However, the queer representation is excellent and readers who have personal struggles in coming out will be sure to identify with Jade’s internal monologue.
Jade has a complex relationship with her family, she has been promised funding for college if she helps restore an old house in Vietnam her father has bought and is looking to open as a hotel. However, the house has a dark history and at times inserts itself in the narrative and the story also dips into the colonial aspects of the house and local area. The supernatural story did not particularly grab me, with Jade suffering from sleep paralysis and sees ghosts from the house’s past. As nobody believes her, she attempts to fake hauntings and I found this part of the story rather bizarre. Along the way a new romance develops, following the pattern you might expect in a coming-of-age novel. The haunting and the house had some good ideas with the use of insects and body parts, some of which was a bit gory. This was an ambitious and quite challenging novel which might make an impression on stronger readers looking for a thoughtful read, but it is definitely not for all tastes. AGE RANGE 14+
Tony Jones
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