Scary Fantasy

A crackling fire. Weird shadows. Strange noises. And a scary story. Are Robot and Rico ready for their first campout?

Brooklyn Stevens sits in a pool of her own blood, tied up and gagged. No one outside of these dank basement walls knows she’s here. No one can hear her scream. A terrifying tale in the tradition of Carrie and The Exorcist.

Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead. So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now armed with his father's mysterious and deadly atheme, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. They follow legends and local lore, destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay. Searching for a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas expects the usual: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage.

Riley has crossed the bridge into the afterlife - a place called Here, where time is always Now. She has picked up life where she left off when she was alive, living with her parents and dog in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. When she’s summoned before The Council, she learns that the afterlife isn’t just an eternity of leisure. She’s been assigned a job, Soul Catcher, and a teacher, Bodhi, a possibly cute, seemingly nerdy boy who’s definitely hiding something.

Cass thinks she might have this ghost-hunting thing down. After all, she and her ghost best friend, Jacob, have survived two haunted cities while traveling for her parents' TV show. But nothing can prepare Cass for New Orleans, which wears all of its hauntings on its sleeve. In a city of ghost tours and tombs, raucous music and all kinds of magic, Cass could get lost in all the colorful, grisly local legends. And the city's biggest surprise is a foe Cass never expected to face: a servant of Death itself.

Sam can't wait to go on her first cruise...sun, fun, and lots of good food. But when some slimy guests show up, Sam's excitement turns into fear. Do these gooey blob monsters want more than just the all-you-can-eat buffet?

Billy can’t wait to start frog dissections at school. It’ll be so slimy and gross! But his rowdy behavior earns him a boring alternate lab assignment instead. Now he’s out for revenge against the science teacher, spooky Ms. Wilson, with plans to leave a “witches' stew” of half-dissected amphibians on her desk. But when he sneaks into the classroom at night, something moves. Then it croaks. The frogs have come back to life!

Beth doesn’t really have friends until she meets Lizzie, the girl who’s just moved into the upstairs apartment. At first, it seems like a perfect match. Lizzie likes all the same stuff and wants to hang out constantly. But the friendship turns creepy when Lizzie starts copying Beth’s style down to the smallest detail, and Beth can’t shake the strange feeling that she’s being silently studied. Did Beth find a BFF...or something more sinister?

The second volume in the Dark Visions trilogy follows Kaitlyn Fairchild and her four friends as they listen to the psychic voices calling them and travel to an isolated house - where terror awaits.

Liv has been dealing with a lot lately. She and her family have just moved in with her mother's new boyfriend in London, and she's starting over (again) at a new school. But Liv isn't sure that explains her dreams, which have gone from odd to...well, bizarre. Lately her nighttime hours have been filled with talking stone statues, mysterious corridors, and creepy rituals conducted by four boys in a graveyard. The strangest part is that Liv recognizes the boys....

A group of six young miners are exploring Asteroid AX245 to find the mineral ixonium. It is the most valuable substance in the galaxy and is used to power interstellar travel. The group splits into three teams to explore some tunnels in the asteroid’s surface. But just before one team begins digging into the rock, they receive an urgent message. The other team reports seeing a black, gooey substance oozing out of the rock. Their report is cut off by their loud screams—and then total silence. What happened to Team Gamma? And what is the black goo that seems to have a will of its own?

The beautiful saga about surviving the zombie apocalypse that David Simpson created continues. This book focuses on the relationship between Jessie, the disfigured road angel, and Scarlet, the daughter of the high priest of the Anubis cult. They are both damaged and young and have to bear a heavy burden for their age. Both have powers beyond human capacity. Both are the children and heirs to their fathers' legacies and empires, and they should be mortal enemies, not working together. They should be trying to kill each other, not trying to save what's left of the world.

Newbery Medal winner Laura Amy Schlitz's gothic novel in the grand Victorian tradition, Spledors and Glooms, is set in London and centered around the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, who goes missing. Two children realize it is their guardian, a Venetian-born puppeteer and magician, who has kidnapped her and used his dark powers to imprison her mind and body in the form of a puppet and strive to return her to human form.

In Mexico, fitting in might be easier than Jed imagined, with holidays such as Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Here, a rising eighth-grade zombie boy and his zombie dog won't draw that much attention. But then Tread unwittingly sets off Mexico's Chupacabra Defense Network, and Jed accidentally collides with a bus. So much for blending in. The unusual pair catch the eye of a professional wrestler, who challenges Jed to a fight!

Jed's not your typical middle school geek. He is, to use the politically correct term, cardiovascularly challenged. And while his parents have attempted to shield him from the implications of being different for as long as they could (Jed was eight and at a friend's sister's birthday party when he blew his lips off onto the cake in front of everyone, finally prompting the "big talk" from his parents and an emergency superglue repair by his dad), seventh grade at Pine Hollow Middle School as a target of Robbie the supreme school bully and his pack of moronic toadies is rapidly becoming unbearable.

Imagine a Depression-era town where it hasn't rained for years. A pale rainmaker with other-worldly eyes brings rain to the countryside and mesmerizes the townspeople, but the children begin to disappear one by one. Only young Robert Steelgate is able to resist the rainmaker's spell and begin the struggle to discover what has happened to his missing brother and the other children.

Cordelia Liu’s first year at Shadow School was a success. She studied hard and made friends. She also sent hundreds of ghosts into the afterlife, because Shadow School isn’t a normal school, and Cordelia Liu isn’t a normal girl. But her second year is already different. Ghosts are refusing to move on, the teachers are acting weird, and Cordelia’s best friends, Benji and Agnes, aren’t as interested in rescuing the ghosts as they used to be.

When twelve-year-old Rory applies for a job at a spooky old mansion in his gloomy seaside town, he finds the owner, Lord Foxglove, odd and unpleasant. But he and his mom need the money, so he takes the job anyway. Rory soon finds out that his new boss is not just strange, he’s not even human—and he’s trying to steal the townspeople’s shadows.

Spark is not your average teddy bear. She's soft and cuddly, sure, but she's also a fierce warrior. At night she fulfills her sacred duty: to protect the household from monsters. But Spark's owner Loretta is growing up and thinks she doesn't need her old teddy anymore. When a monster unlike any other descends on the quiet home, everything changes. Children are going missing, and the monster wants Loretta next. Only Spark can stop it. She must call upon the ancient League of Ursus - a secret alliance of teddy bears who are pledged to protect their human friends

Abandoned by her mother and neglected by her scientist father, timid Elizabeth Murmur has only her fearless friend, Zenobia, for company. And Zenobia's company can be very trying! When Elizabeth's father takes them to live in his family home, Witheringe House, Zenobia becomes obsessed with finding a ghost in the creepy old mansion and forces Elizabeth to hold séances and wander the rooms at night. With Zenobia's constant pushing, Elizabeth investigates the history of the house and learns that it does hold a terrible secret.