Ringing in the End of (Summer) Days

Oh yeah. Months of waiting, but folks it is finally time! What better way to kick of your August reading than with Hailey Piper’s newest, teeth-tastic horror novel. When Yaya Betancourt discovers that she has spouted teeth in her vagina, she assumes that it is a side effect of a pharmaceutically induced genetic condition that she and thousands of others developed in the womb with a little help from AlphaBeta Pharmaceutical. Whoops. But when she realizes that ABP is determined to hunt her down after her incident of toothy sprouting, and when her condition suddenly… worsens… Yaya has to consider the possibility that there may be another, darker motive behind ABP’s pursuit.

You know how sometimes you trip across one of those books that’s just an instant purchase/preorder? Yeah. I have been (im)patiently waiting for Tidepool, and I am so glad that’s almost here! It’s 1913, and Sorrow Hamilton’s brother Henry has gone missing from the small town of Tidepool. Despite her father’s demand that she remain home in Baltimore, she sets out to find her brother. When eviscerated bodies start washing up with the tide, Sorrow has to consider the possibility that when it comes to Tidepool and its secrets, she may be in way over her head.

Finally. Come to my arms delightful, queer small town YA horror novel. Two girls – Logan, whose dads are the stars of the popular TV ghost hunting show ParaSpectors, and Ashley, a Snakebite native whose boyfriend has gone missing – face off against a small town full of secrets, slipping slowly into chaos. Ashley’s boyfriend was only the first in a string of missing teenagers, and now he’s returned to haunt her. The only one she can trust is Logan as the pair’s investigation into the town’s secrets threatens everything they believe they know about Snakebite, their families, and themselves.

You know that horror trope where the unsuspecting family movies into a new house in a new town and a new state and it’s supposed to be their fresh start? Forget the past, honey! Everything’s going to be great here in Haunted House in Murder, U.S.A.! (Okay not really but you get the point.) Well for Lily’s family, the move to Florida that really was suppose to be their beginning couldn’t be off to a worse start. The house is disgusting, full of trash with a slime ridden pool in the backyard and an old dock crumbling away into the creepy swamp out back. But the worst part is that Lily is pretty sure the house is haunted, and no one will believe her.

Hang onto your bookmarks, folks, because I’ve been hearing some amazing things about Jessica Lewis’ Bad Witch Burning. If you like your books dark, emotional, and witchy (with a side of necromancy for good measure) this is going to be one YA horror novel you will not want to miss! Katrell makes her living talking to the dead. But while clients are happy to pay her for access to their dead loved ones, they don’t pay well enough. So when a routine summoning goes wrong, resulting in Katrell accidentally raising a spirit from the dead and her realizing how much money there is to be made from a little light necromancy, she jumps at the chance to put poverty behind her. Even warnings from the dead themselves can’t slow her down. But the bigger the magic the higher the price, and the dark is circling, waiting for Katrell to fall.

I am absolutely going to die a slow death waiting for the end of August when I can finally get my hands on My Heart is a Chainsaw. I have been making grabby hands at this slasher-inspired horror for months, and I am so excited. Jade Daniels has always been an outsider in Proofrock, the small lake town she grew up in that is now slowly being over run by gentrification. In her anger and her loneliness, Jade turns to horror for comfort, letting herself get lost in a world of masked killers and revenge. But when Proofrock’s wealthy newcomers begin dying in bizarre ways, Jade realizes that there is a familiar pattern to their deaths. A pattern that only she can see, and that may foretell a massacre in the making.