In small-town Ireland, Marina feels very much on the outside of things in her new secondary school, unlike her more confident younger sister. As the first anniversary of her father’s death approaches, she becomes even more unsettled. “A few weeks ago, the nightmares had started. She could barely remember them, just snapshots of feelings. Falling, sinking, darkness. And a huge mouth, full of emptiness and hunger that wanted to devour her. Now maybe another world was calling. A mysterious world hidden between the ever-falling rain in Ireland. She felt like something was coming for her.”
The World Between the Rain (Everything With Words, £8.99) is the first novel from academic, podcaster and now fiction writer Susan Cahill, whose work on representations of Irish girlhood informs this moving, surprising fantasy novel for young teens. There are echoes of classic adventure stories and sea-related myths here, but this is also very much its own thing. The story moves from a contemporary mystery in which all the adults in the town, bar an eccentric newfound grandmother, cannot be woken up from a sinister sleep, to an underwater voyage that sees Marina “lost at sea with no one but a grumpy, badly-dressed boy who’d never been anywhere other than his floating town”, before deftly connecting the seemingly disparate threads in a satisfying resolution.
Underneath all of it, there’s Marina’s ache to fit in, to be accepted and loved for who she is – “Why did people always think she was weird? Why was it always so hard?” – and to deal with the “bottomless well full of sadness” that her life has been since her father’s death, something that may be connected to the “hungry sea monster” that lurks menacingly at the edges of this world. It would be reductive to describe this simply as a book about grief – it is far more nuanced than that, and its fantastical elements are carefully thought out – but its handling of that topic is certainly its greatest strength. This is an impressive, stylish debut.
Horror fiction has long enjoyed nodding to its own familiar tropes within the text, or getting a bit “meta” about it all (think Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, for example), but for many contemporary readers and viewers the most relevant cultural touchstone is the Scream franchise. The first in this series of self-aware slasher films hit screens almost 30 years ago (perhaps a detail more terrifying than Ghostface the killer, for some of us), and remains an influence on contemporary teen horror to this day – perhaps now even more so in our current BookTok era, which delights in categorising titles primarily by their featured tropes.
Content creator and film graduate Bill Wood’s Let’s Split Up (Scholastic, £8.99), nodding to that classic horror movie mistake from the very beginning, is occasionally a little heavy-handed in its genre-aware commentary: “Murders, haunted house, group of teens thinking they’re smart enough to solve the mystery themselves, a bumbling sheriff, credulous public, the manipulative reporter? All the cliches are there.”
Indeed they are, and the California setting might be added to the list – but it’s a fun, sweet read that also involves a refreshingly low-drama “friends to lovers” plot between two of the characters, and sidesteps what initially seems like a predictable twist involving the mysterious new girl. There’s also an element of nostalgia – or imagined nostalgia – with the early-2000s setting, in which characters do quaint things such as go to the library to research topics in (gasp) books, and communicate on their phones mainly to arrange in-person meet-ups. Ah, the olden days.
The various slasher-film tropes are similarly catalogued and commented upon in Scarlett Dunmore’s How to Survive a Horror Movie (Little Tiger, £8.99), which sees every chapter offer a new “rule” for how to stay alive in those circumstances. Here the mysterious new girl serves as narrator: Charley Sullivan, formerly known as Lottie Ryan, whose secrets have led her to flee “the city, my questionable choice of friends, my bad decisions”. This is how she’s ended up on “a dark foreboding piece of land jutting out of the North Atlantic. Harrogate School for Girls towered over the ocean, sitting high on the rock looking down menacingly like a gargoyle perched on a cathedral. Turrets and stained-glass windows, wrought-iron gates and old masonry. It sat so close to the cliff edge that I worried it would tip and fall with me inside, along with my cherished Stephen King hardcover editions.”
Charley responds to her isolated gothic setting by bonding with her roommate, Olive, over watching and dissecting scary movies, and by trying to pretend the mean, popular girls don’t exist. It becomes slightly trickier when classmates start turning up dead – after the third body, the school’s insistence that these are simply tragic accidents starts wearing a bit thin – and even more so when ghosts of the dead girls follow Charley around.
The fast pace works brilliantly here – just as you think you’ve figured out what’s going on, there’s another shocking swerve. But perhaps the most effective element is the humour – despite the grim events, we still get to see the mean girls mining the tragedy for their own ends, and to witness the murder victims shaken but essentially unchanged by their deaths, complete with annoying habits. The set-up for the sequel may be a little predictable – the nods to the influences are plentiful, and truly it could only end as it does – but the story’s so entertaining that it’s hard to mind. Thoroughly enjoyable.
More ghostly classmates can be found in Rosie Talbot and Sarah Maxwell’s Phantom Hearts (Scholastic, £8.99), a graphic novel that blends what initially seems like a murder investigation with a thoughtful romance. The horror influences are less overt here; despite the supernatural element, the focus is more realistic, with classmates’ secrets slowly unfurling in ways fans of Karen McManus (One of Us Is Lying) will appreciate.
Just as one should never separate from one’s friends while a killer is on the loose, one should never, ever make a deal with the faeries – their trickery is legendary. The titular character in Bex Hogan’s Nettle (Zephyr, £14.99) knows this all too well, but after wandering into a strange realm, she’s desperate. Her grandmother is dying, and the deal the faerie king offers seems the only way Nettle might ever save her, and indeed return home to the world she has grown up in.
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Nettle is quickly advised by a fellow trapped human that the faeries “are not our friends, no matter how convincing they may seem ... At best, we’re lapdogs to them. Disposable and replaceable.” Still, she has a task to complete, and reasons: “Even if I spent the rest of my life trying, that was better than spending it defeated.” The deceptive magic of the faeries soon becomes clear – how can she harvest nettles with a knife that can never make contact, or fill a sack full if it keeps emptying itself? – but she continues to persist, finding her own loopholes and drawing on the advice her grandmother has provided throughout the years.
This is an elegant, dreamy tale steeped in folklore references, featuring a resourceful protagonist doing her best to counter the dark, devious bargains of the faerie world.
