Truly Terrifying YA Books

 We’ve all been there: sitting up in bed at three in the morning, novel clutched in our hand, the words shivering through us as our heart beats faster and faster, unable to stop reading, partly because the book is so good that we have to find out what happens and partly because we are too afraid to turn out the light. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just try reading one of the books on this list. Each one of these Truly Terrifying YA books inspired me to pull the blanket just a little bit tighter around me and wonder: Could there be something out there in the darkness?

The End of The Chapter: The Moth Diaries

As each chapter ends, the desire to put the book down in order to go to the bathroom, go to sleep, or get going to work may come over the reader. Smart authors avoid this by making the ends of their chapters so fantastic that the reader has no choice but to continue on their literary journey, uninterrupted. Some do this with thrilling cliffhangers, others with painful emotional reveals. Regardless of the technique, the end of the chapter has a certain feel to it, a teasing look that says, “Sure, this part of the story’s over. But don’t you want to find out what happens next?

Today, I am celebrating the end of the preface in The Moth Diaries by Rachel Klein (Bantam, 2003).