Scary Books for Tweens

Eleven-year-old Corinne must call on her courage and an ancient magic to stop an evil spirit and save her island home.

Josie must discover the connection between a strange house in the woods, her grandmother's stories, and missing children, or risk losing her sister to dark magic.

Chased into the woods by neighborhood bullies who are after his Halloween candy, fifth grader Charlie Cooper quickly gets lost and finds his way into Vampyreishtat--or Monsterland, an uncharted land where werewolves, mummies, and vampires live freely--and with the help of the Monster of all Monsters, Charlie hopes he will find his cousin Billy who disappeared a year ago.

Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, bring raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead. There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy--an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace...

In 1930s Alabama, twelve-year-old Hoodoo Hatcher is the only member of his family who seems unable to practice folk magic, but when a mysterious man called the Stranger puts the entire town at risk from his black magic, Hoodoo must learn to conjure to defeat him.

Zach, Alice, and Poppy, friends from a Pennsylvania middle school who have long enjoyed acting out imaginary adventures with dolls and action figures, embark on a real-life quest to Ohio to bury a doll made from the ashes of a dead girl.

Apprehensive about spending the summer in Washington State with his Aunt Ethel when his parents get an overseas job, twelve-year-old Josh soon finds adventure when he meets the ghost of a coal miner.

"When wasps come to Steve in a dream offering to fix his sick baby brother, he thinks all he has to do is say yes. But yes may not mean what Steve thinks it means"--

When fearful twelve-year-old Charlie and his bolder younger sister are sent to visit a grandmother they never knew they had, they discover a dark secret.

When timid Elizabeth's father takes her and her fearless friend, Zenobia, to his family home, Zenobia becomes obsessed with finding a ghost there, and then Elizabeth learns she had an aunt who disappeared from the house years ago.