Best Scary Books to Read for Young Adults 2024

If you love reading, and you can get through some books quickly, you might want to enjoy some of the best scary books for young adults.

Some people love to read scary stories all the time, but others save their spooky time for the month of October and the Halloween holiday. Regardless of which category you fit into, reading some scary books for young adults can be a great way to pick up some new books and enjoy some stories that bring the fright off the pages to your mind.

Here are a few of the best scary books to read for young adults.

A Place for Vanishing

While returning to a mother’s childhood home, a teen girl discovers some sinister secrets without the amazing beauty of the home. This was supposed to be a fresh start for the family, but a tragedy that took place before their arrival signifies the unusual nature of the home. From the beginning, the characters experience strange events and impossible phenomena that make the family feel unsafe in the home. This house keeps secrets that you can uncover when you read the book.

Not Dead Enough

Can you imagine being haunted by a dead ex-boyfriend? This is exactly what happens in this amazing book. It is certainly one of the best scary books to read, and it will bring the haunting and creepiness off the pages and into your mind. The girl tries to get back to normal, but the car crash that killed her boyfriend continues to come back to haunt her and provide the trauma that many might feel when running from their past, but in this case, she is running from a dead ex-boyfriend.

The Invocations

When one sister misses the other who had been murdered, instead of simply grieving, the live sister works to do everything she can to bring her lost sister back. This means even trading in the occult and studying demonic deals that end up going horribly wrong. When working with a witch with a sinister past and deadly power, the live sister sees the witch as her only hope to bring back her dead sister in body and spirit, but the witch turns out to be a serial killer.

I Will Follow

Can one of the best scary books bring social media into the fold to be a modern-day horror story? It can be when a follower decides to join the fray of TikTok fandom for one influencer. This follower soon becomes a stalker and kidnaps the influencer to show her that the two should be best friends. This could be a modern-day take on Stephen King’s Misery, seeing a fan turned into a crazy person because they can’t seem to make the other person understand their desire for friendship.

My Throat An Open Grave

Horror often starts with romance, and that’s exactly what happens in this book. A girl wishes her baby brother away to the Lord of the Wood, and things go horribly wrong. The girl grows up in a church town and does everything she can to be righteous, but the toll taken by having to care for her brother is too much. After she gives away her brother, she is forced to cross the river to the Lord of the Wood’s domain to bring him back.

The Bad Ones

When you want to reach one of the best scary books available right now, you might want a story of mysterious and supernatural disappearances. In this book, four such disappearances occur in a town haunted by a sinister magical history. These four people vanish without a trace on one winter’s night, but one person attempts to untangle the disappearance of her best friend. This leads her to discover the town’s dark past and some coded messages left for her by the vanished friend.

Where the Dark Stands Still

This is the tale of a girl with dangerous magic who chooses to make a risky deal with a demon to give up her magic. This magic has caused nothing but disaster, and she’s attempted to suppress it, but to no avail. With the desire to be free of it, she goes into the demon-inhabited woods to steal a flower that should take away her powers. Unfortunately, going after this flower has dire consequences and horrors that are better left on the pages of this book.

These are just a few of the best scary books for young adults to enjoy this year. You can scar yourself with any of them during the spooky season or at other times of the year.