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If there’s a tween in your life looking for a spooky story this Halloween season, these picks are eerie but not too scary. Aimed at 8-to-12-year-olds but enjoyable for all who appreciate a good ghost story, these titles deliver chills and suspense!

The Lost Library by Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead is told from the alternating perspectives of a cat, a ghost librarian and an anxious middle-schooler named Evan. When Evan takes two books out of a little free library that’s cropped up overnight, he becomes embroiled in a mystery that unearths long-held secrets in his small town. A gentle book that celebrates the power of community and stories, with a page-turning ghost story at its heart.

The Forgotten Girl by India Hill Brown is decidedly creepier, but similarly deals with buried community history. Playing in the woods on a cold winter night, two friends, Iris and Daniel, stumble on a child’s grave in a neglected Black cemetery. While the friends work to restore the cemetery and achieve recognition for the citizens buried there, unsettling things begin happening: the child from the grave is determined to find a BFF, and Iris has become her target.

If you prefer your spooky stories with a dash of humor, try Wretched Waterpark, the first in the Sinister Summer series by Kiersten White. In the series, the Sinister-Winterbottom twins solve mysteries at increasingly bizarre summer vacation destinations as they attempt to locate their parents, who have left them with their weird Aunt Saffronia. It might be hard to imagine a gothic tale set in a waterpark, but you haven’t visited Fathoms of Fun, where the employees wear unseasonable black attire, a shadowy figure looms from the top of the slide tower and a mysterious black goo is seeping into the wave pool.

If an action-filled supernatural fantasy is more your speed, pick up Claribel A. Ortega’s Ghost Squad. Lucely and her best friend Syd accidentally cast a spell that awakens malicious spirits, who begin wreaking havoc across old-town St. Augustine. Syd’s witch grandmother helps the girls in their quest to reverse the curse, culminating in a chilling encounter in a cemetery at midnight. Managing to be both heartwarming and spine-tingling, woven with Dominican culture and mythology, this is a high-energy, magical adventure.

In Small Spaces by Katherine Arden, a field trip to a farm begins innocently enough, but slowly becomes a full-on nightmare for Ollie and her friends as they take to the woods to escape the “smiling man,” a sinister specter who grants your greatest wish, but only for the ultimate price. Featuring a strange bus driver, a field full of staring scarecrows and a previously broken digital watch that suddenly begins flashing the word “RUN,” Ollie and her friends will lead you on an exquisitely paced fight for survival against forces living and dead. The most intense of the bunch!

Anne Wilmoth is a children’s and collection services librarian at Iowa City Public Library. Her favorite local hiking trail is at F.W. Kent County Park. This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2023 issue.