YA Horror Round-Up Jan/Feb 2026: Must-Read Thrills, Zombie Classics & LGBTQ+ Chills
In an attempt to clear the decks, here are a new bunch of books either already published or dropping before March. My favourite, by some distance, is a rerelease of a superlative and totally unique YA zombie novel, so if you missed This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers first time around then this new Definitive Edition, with the bonus Please Remain Calm novella is totally unmissable. Apparently there is a film version in the works which is the reason for this rerelease. Buck Turner’s Evergreen is also a rerelease, which I had never come across before, and is rare because it features an endangered species, a male lead character!
Elsewhere the excellent thriller horror writer Vincent Ralph releases two novels back-to-back in his new Bleak Haven series. I thought the first Dead Fake was a significantly stronger read than his second, Night Terror, which is much too early in a series for an origins prequel story.
Tori Bovalino has been one of my favourite YA writers for a while and is a solid read. Christina Ferko’s The Darkness Greeted Her takes us onto familiar horror territory, that of summer camps, and manages to bring some new life to a story built around a group of troubled teenage girls. Finally, Bill Wood heads to 2002 with Be Right Back, the sequel to his 2024 hit Let’s Split Up.
Tori Bovalino – I, in the Shadows
Publisher : Titan Books
I am a huge fan of Tori Bovalino and included her first two YA novels The Devil Makes Three (2021), Not Good For Maidens (2022) along with the anthology she edited The Gathering Dark (2022) in my YA Horror 400 almanac. Following 2024’s My Throat an Open Grave Bovalino is back with a new supernatural ghost story which leans heavily on romance.
The storyline is not as complex as most of her other work and for the most part plays out as a teen drama featuring the ghost of a teenage boy who is connected to girls, who do not know each other when the story opens. I am unsure whether using a ghost to help with maths homework and then give tips on how to get close to a girl the main character has a crush on is enough to carry an entire novel, but that remains one of the core story threads.
The action opens when Drew Tarpin moves into the house which Liam used to live in, having been dead for ten months he is unable to leave the house and also unable to move onto the next spiritual realm. By chance Drew and her elder brother Reece have the uncanny ability of seeing ghosts and helping them depart.
However, Reece is away at college and so Drew has to help Liam move on herself. Along the way she meets Hannah, a popular and gorgeous girl at school, who was also Liam’s best friend. Liam gives Drew tips on how to get to know Hannah, whilst he has his own secrets. In the background creatures lurk which devour ghosts and as the novel moves on edge closer to Liam, without ever truly getting scary. As you can probably tell, things get messy as the three way friendship/relation between Drew, Hannah and the ghost spirals out of control as true feelings are revealed in an LGBTQ+ drama which is more romance than horror. AGE RANGE 13+
Christina Ferko – The Darkness Greeted Her
Publisher : Sourcebooks Fire
The Darkness Greeted Her is a solid YA debut from Christina Ferko, which although is nothing new, still manages to avoid the many lurking cliches by setting a novel in a summer camp for girls. Set in a remote camp in the Appalachian wilderness, Camp Whitewood is an exclusive therapy retreat specifically for girls with mental health problems and only has a very small number of paying customers.
Although a horror novel, the story takes a realistic look at mental health and balances this with the developing horror. For much of the story the reader is unsure whether there is something supernatural going on or not. For example, in one scene two girls are chatting and a moment later when a counsellor passes there is a bottle of whiskey between them. This causes conflict and neither of the girls know where it came from.
Main character’s Penny’s abusive father is dead…but she still hears his voice in her head, encouraging her to hurt those around her. She can’t go to school or be around her friends or even draw with a sharp pencil without her intrusive thoughts urging her toward violence. This is skilfully handled and Penny is desperate to get a handle on her OCD and feels optimistic when she arrives.
Soon Penny starts seeing things that can’t possibly be there: the gold watch her father was buried with and a terrifying figure she calls the ‘Shadow Man’ looming at the foot of her bed. If anything the Shadow Man made too many appearances without doing very much and could perhaps have been held back longer whilst the reader guesses what is real and what is not. Linking this to personal trauma was a neat idea and is backed up by a cute simmering LGBTQ+ romance. Other characters are introduced, with their own traumas, but are given little page time when the action begins to flow. AGE RANGE 13+
Vincent Ralph – Dead Fake (Bleak Haven book 1)
Publisher : Wednesday Books
Since 2019 Vincent Ralph has impressed greatly with a run of edgy thrillers which lean heavily into horror, Are You Watching? (2019) Lock the Doors (2021), Secrets Never Die (2023) and One House Left (2024). The most recent of these books was previously reviewed on Ginger Nuts and his latest Dead Fake is another spicy page-turning horror thriller which will have you guessing until the final pages.
In the great tradition of Scream, and the hundreds of imitations it spawned, good luck guessing the killer, as it’s always the person you least expect, but is also nicely fitted into the backstory. Set in the town of Bleak Haven, which has more than its fair share of serial killers, hell, even the main character’s home room teacher is a surviving Final Girl from a serial killer rampage several decades earlier! Vincent Ralph will be returning to Bleak Haven for the simultaneously published Night Terror (although ‘Click to Kill’ would have equally cool.
Dead Fake does not do much new but does it very well by adding a realistic and thoughtful plot about Deep Fakes into its narrative. Written in the first person, our main character is teenager Ava Wilson whose uncle ten years earlier murdered a family of neighbours. Even though a decade has past Eva has struggled to get over it and busies herself by writing for the school newspaper and staying close to her family. Early in the plot a website appears called ‘Swipe or Die’ in which AI generated versions of her classmates are killed off in slasher horror film fashion.
Her best friend and newspaper editor is the first to die, others follow, and then the murders start for real and Ava finds herself in the middle of the action and makes connections to her dead uncle. Dead Fake quickly develops into a clever and speedy thriller and was equally convincing in how it approached Deep Fakes, with the idea then teenage girls might live in fear than some classmate might Deep Fake them nude or worse.
A lot of the action was set in the local high school and it was easy to see how such websites can snowball. A highly recommended page-turner, which like all good horrors deserves a sequel. Although the characters were older teens, there was little graphic violence, no sex and hardly any swearing. AGE RANGE 13+
Vincent Ralph – Night Terror (Bleak Haven 2)
Publisher : Wednesday Books
Night Terror is billed as book two in the Bleak Haven series and is published around the same time as book one, Dead Fake. I’m unsure of the publication strategy behind releasing both books at the same time, especially as they are not connected by much beyond being set in the same time and with Night Terror being set in 1987 rather than the present day.
This book also reads like a type of origin story, but this is ill advised as the series really needs to build up some sort of presence before jumping into the past. I have a feeling teenagers who have read Dead Fake, which did end with a twist/cliff hanger which promised a sequel, will be disappointed by this rather dull and pedestrian jump back into 1987. Dead Fake was a clever serial killer horror thriller, which had no supernatural elements in the plot, this is the opposite and quite early in the action introduces a creature, and as villains go was dull and one dimensional.
As already mentioned in my review of Dead Fake Bleak Haven is a town which breeds serial killers, has a dark history and kids are taught to be on their guard all the time. Early in the action main character Noah is working in the local bookshop when it is held up by mask attackers looking for an old book which contains secret information about the town’s serial killers.
They find the Burning Book hidden under the floorboards and, completely underestimating its savage power, bring back to life a vicious and notorious serial killer from a couple of decades earlier. The rest of the novel is a fight for survival with Noah, trapped customers (including a love interest) and the attackers who realise they have made a terrible mistake. Some of the banter was fun, but there was not enough connecting this to the other book except the serial killers, and the book lacked suspense with it being entirely set in the bookshop and maul. You could enjoy Dead Fake and easily skip this one. AGE RANGE 13+
Courtney Summers – This Is Not a Test: The Definitive Edition with Please Remain Calm
Publisher : Bindery Books
This is Not a Test is one of my favourite YA zombie novels, originally published in 2012, this new edition connects to the film version and has a prequel novella, Please Remain Calm. This review is taken from The YA Horror 400 almanac. Yes, I loved this book.
Sloan has a violent father who treats her like trash, wakes up to a zombie holocaust just as he is verbally abusing her over breakfast. In this outstanding teen drama, she and five school friends battle for survival as the zombie masses surround their school. Since Sloane was deserted by her elder sister, she has struggled to cope, in a novel which abandons action for a more measured and thoughtful approach to the end of the world. For significant sections of the story, you might even forget there are zombies beyond the school, as many of the usual tropes are refreshingly absent.
This was a character driven novel that was both moving and raw with emotion as the struggle for survival and the paranoia involved in keeping the school secure. This is Not a Test refused to sensationalise the apocalypse, and it takes time before it develops into a more traditional horror novel, which was cleverly and subtlety handled with the unknown fate of the sister raising questions in the background. Ultimately, it is a story about people and how they react to the situation, and is backed up by an outstanding lead character which goes full circle, hurtling into a highly emotive ending.
Buck Turner – Evergreen
Publisher : Sourcebooks Fire
Evergreen was first published back in 2012. It is a solid and enjoyable read but does not have enough going for it to warrant multiple publications. Some of the previous covers were seriously saccharin and heavily romance looking, whilst the latest goes for more of a mysterious style.
The slow burning romance, which is crucial to the story, was very cute and it was nice to read a novel of this type written entirely from a male perspective, as the girl perspective continues to totally dominate these types of books. For a fair stretch of Evergreen the story comes across as a standard coming-of-age story of a teenage boy who ends up living in a small town his mother grew up in, developing a crush on the gorgeous girl who lives next door.
Loss lurks in the background, as Cole Mercer lost his father in an air disaster, his mother failing to cope heads to her childhood home in North Carolina. The story mainly concerns how Cole adapts to this new life, particularly with Amanda Davenport, the girl who lives in the house across the street. Recognizing Cole is a fish out of water, she befriends him and opens his eyes to life in a small town.
What follows is part romance, part drama, friendship issues, with bullying thrown into the mix along with a big dollop of teen angst. The supernatural angle felt rather tacked on and might surprise some readers. I also loved the long game of chess Cole plays with the elderly hermit, Thaddeus Finch, he befriends. As he navigates the wilds of small town living the story also concerns the darkness which bubbles under the surface. AGE RANGE 13/14+
Bill Wood – Be Right Back
Publisher : Scholastic
Bill Wood’s debut Let’s Split Up was released back in 2024, I read the book, but never got around to reviewing it, but it was covered positively elsewhere on the site by Jim McLeod. Be Right Back picks up the same story a year later, with all the characters returning home from college for a big Halloween event.
The original revolves, in true Scooby -Doo style, around a group of high school age teens trying to solve a string of local murders. After doing so they become small-scale celebrities with true crime buffs, and within hours of returning home the ‘Carrington Ghoul’ resurfaces and there is a fresh murder. Or in true Scream fashion (the story is set in 2002 after all) is it a copycat, or somebody trying to drum up hype for the Halloween festival? This big event rather crassly even celebrates the killer and intends to turn one of the kill sites into a museum.
Be Right Back jogs along at a decent pace and is an easy light read which never truly grabs by the throat, perhaps the ‘Carrington Ghoul’ is just not interesting enough to bring back for a sequel. Alternatively, an entirely new mystery for the ‘Sanera Four’ might have worked better, as this felt slightly reheated, lacking anything new. Once again the story is told via four split person narratives, Cam, Jonesy, Buffy and Amber who quickly blend together into one indistinguishable voice.
Cam has remained in town and works as a sports coach at his old high school, whilst Buffy returns with a new boyfriend, otherwise the “I” narrative could have been any of the four. The story plays around with urban legends, has lots of horror film references and quickly the four have to question whether they truly got the correct killer and the story is off and running. If you enjoyed the original there is still fun to be had here, I would definitely read Let’s Split Up first though if you are new to the series.
The final book in the trilogy, One Last Scare, is released later in 2026. There is no sex, virtually no swearing or violence so suitable for all teens, even if the characters are of college age. AGE RANGE 12/13+
Tony Jones
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