It's possible to be chilled to the bone without meeting any vampires. In Tim Bowler's frightening and well paced Buried Thunder (Oxford University Press £12.99), Maya's enemy is a personal demon. Something in the forest doesn't like her, and it follows her into the country house where her family runs a hotel. The suspense and claustrophobia, and the war in Maya's head between reason and paranoia, reminded me of Alan Garner's classic The Owl Service. It was hard to believe that Maya's family could move into their new home, acquire guests and scare them away all within a week, but the story is strong enough to survive a sketchy set-up.
Equally chilling, with the mist of the Essex marshes in its bones, is Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough (Bodley Head £10.99). East End sisters Mimi and Cora are sent to stay with their highly strung aunt in a decaying mansion which is shunned by the locals (as are the girls, this being the 1950s and snobbery running high). Long Lankin, an English folk villain, has been snatching children here since the days of witch-burning. Mimi is the right age for snatching, and Auntie Ida's rules about locking up seem made to be broken. The terror is as relentless as the ballad the story springs from.
In Gillian Philip's edgy contemporary thriller, The Opposite of Amber (Bloomsbury £6.99), Ruby has been brought up by her sister Jinn since their mother died but is left alone when Jinn gets a new boyfriend who is linked to the drugs scene of their depressed seaside resort. Just as Ruby's own new relationship is healing her wounds, a serial killer strikes.
Alix in Miriam Halahmy's Hidden (Meadowside £6.99) is a little like Ruby, dealing with responsibilities beyond her years and finding her community (Hayling Island in the Solent) judgmental and excluding. Her fragile bond with an Iraqi refugee boy at school is strengthened when they save an illegal immigrant from drowning and hide him on the beach. As the three deal with crises, unsure who to trust, the pace of the narrative carries the reader through the somewhat heavy messages about justice and integrity.
In Annabel Pitcher's My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece (Orion £9.99), a breakthrough occurs for James, who lives in a Lake District village, when he befriends a Muslim girl. James's family has been torn apart by his older sister, Rose, being killed by a terrorist bomb. While James is the narrator, this heartbreaking novel is as much concerned with effect of Rose's death on her twin sister, Jas. The surviving children are both invisible to their grieving parents, but Jas has the added burden of trying to help James. His recovery starts when he is able to share his shocking secret: he really doesn't miss Rose. A good model for young people struggling to say the unsayable.
Morris Gleitzman's trademark punchy style and clarity are on display in his latest novel, Grace (Puffin £6.99), which, like his Holocaust trilogy Once, Then and Now, features a child narrator struggling to make sense of a nightmare spun by adults. Only Grace, growing up in a fundamentalist evangelical church community, is supposedly on the right side of the regime which relegates "outsiders" to damnation. Grace's family, friends, school and future are all tied to her church, and when her father is cast out for offending the elders, even her mother assumes that he is lost to the family. Grace, who peppers her speech with Old Testament language, learns the full meaning of the verbs "obey", "smite" and "judge" as she struggles to reunite her family. What could be a bitter and harrowing tale is lightened by a sense of the irrepressible spirit of youth, especially in the voice of Grace's mouthy friend Delilah, who warns Grace with relish: "You are so going to be smitten by wrath."
Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray (Penguin £6.99) finds 15-year-old Lina deported to Siberia from Lithuania during the second world war as part of Stalin's genocide. Lina survives (just) by falling in love and by managing to nurture her inner artist, even while her body is being starved. Based on the author's family memoirs, the novel offers a glimpse of relatively undocumented atrocities and shows some of the many forms that resistance can take.
