#You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight

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3 YA Black Horror Books for Spooky Season

Now that spooky season is in full swing all around me, it's time to turn to some spinechilling reads. It's been an amazing year for Black horror in YA, from an anthology (out October 17th!) to exciting new books that will keep you up all night long. Here are 3 YA horror books with Black protagonists for you to check out!

I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea

There will be blood. Ace of Spades meets House of Hollow in this villain origin story. Laure Mesny is a perfectionist with an axe to grind. Despite being constantly overlooked in the elite and cutthroat world of the Parisian ballet, she will do anything to prove that a Black girl can take center stage.

To level the playing field, Laure ventures deep into the depths of the Catacombs and strikes a deal with a pulsating river of blood. The primordial power Laure gains promises influence and adoration, everything she’s dreamed of and worked toward. With retribution on her mind, she surpasses her bitter and privileged peers, leaving broken bodies behind her on her climb to stardom.

But even as undeniable as she is, Laure is not the only monster around. And her vicious desires make her a perfect target for slaughter. As she descends into madness and the mystifying underworld beneath her, she is faced with the ultimate choice: continue to break herself for scraps of validation or succumb to the darkness that wants her exactly as she is—monstrous heart and all. That is, if the god-killer doesn’t catch her first.

From debut author Jamison Shea comes I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, a slow-burn horror that lifts a veil on the institutions that profit on exclusion and the toll of giving everything to a world that will never love you back.

You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron

At Camp Mirror Lake, terror is the name of the game . . . but can you survive the night? This heart-pounding slasher by New York Times bestselling author Kalynn Bayron is perfect for fans of Fear Street.

Charity Curtis has the summer job of her dreams, playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business.

But the last weekend of the season, Charity's co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity's role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they'll need figure out what this killer is after. Is there is more to the story of Mirror Lake and its dangerous past than Charity ever suspected?

All These Sunken Souls: A Black Horror Anthology by Circe Moskowitz (Anthology editor) -- Out on October 17th!

Welcome to the Dark. We are all familiar with tropes of the horror genre: slasher and victims, demon and the possessed. Bloody screams, haunted visions, and the peddler of wares we aren’t sure we can trust. In this young adult horror anthology, fans of Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country, and Horror Noire will get a little bit of everything they love—and a lot of what they fear—through a twisted blend of horror lenses, from the thoughtful to the terrifying.

From haunted, hungry Victorian mansions, temporal monster–infested asylums, and ravaging zombie apocalypses, to southern gothic hoodoo practitioners and cursed patriarchs in search of Black Excellence, All These Sunken Souls features the chilling creations of acclaimed bestsellers and hot new talents, with stories from Kalynn Bayron, Donyae Coles, Ryan Douglass, Sami Ellis, Brent Lambert, Ashia Monet, Circe Moskowitz, Joel Rochester, Liselle Sambury, and Joelle Wellington.

[aroaessidhe]

read in 2023: cults

The Shadow Cabinet

The Feast Makers

Monstrous

Camp Damascus

You’re Not Supposed To Die Tonight  

Burn 

City of Nightmares

Beholder

My Dearest Darkest

[kikizubik]

You're not supposed die tonight was so good! 80's slashers campy vibes story! Need read more books like it! If you have some recs, give me some, please! Thanks.

[haveyoureadthisqueerbook]

[slaughter-books]

Day 30: JOMPBPC: Read In November

My November, 2023 reading wrap-up! 💜

[foxyfablesblog]

Check out my Book Review: You're Not Supposed To Die Tonight

[slashingdisneypasta]

Okay this book is genuinly scaring me. Reminds me of fucking Bohemian Grove 😅😅 All the owl imagery?? The talk about Powerful People?? (Referencing rich families, presidents, etc) And now a BIG OUTSIDE AMPHITHEATRE IN THE WOODS??

Noooooo no no no. I am very scared and very queezy.

Am I probably gonna have nightmares? Yes. Am I gonna stop reading? No-

[maxalotlxl]

My October TBR

With my attempt to start posting about my journey in reading, I'll be starting with my October TBR. So here are the books I'll be trying to read in this month.

Godkiller by Hannah Kaner This book was shamelessly bought because the cover is absolutely gorgeous, but with the synopsis including a fantasy adventure with some wonderful diverse rep I was very excited to start this book. (Spoiler : I have finished this book as of the 5th)

Masters of Death by Olivie Blake I have two Olivie Blake books on my TBR this month and since I haven't any of her work before I'm really excited to see the hype over her work. Now when I picked up Masters of Death at the bookshop, the woman who served me suggested I go into this without looking up anything before hand and that's what I'll be doing. Wish me luck!

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake Six wizards fighting to survive and be one of the five that gets initiated into some magic society? Sounds like some friendships will be made and betrayals will happen, I'm in. It's clearly not hard for me to sold on a book.

You're Not Supposed To Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron I am trying to dip my toes into genres I wouldn't usually bother with one of those genres would be horror, with how small this book is and the fact I am interested in Kalynn Bayron's other work I thought this would be a good start into the genre.

Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff This is my main audiobook read this month, and one heavily recommended by a friend. So I'm excited to get through this scarily big book, like damn this book is thick, but here's hoping by using the audiobook the fear isn't as bad.

[semper-legens]

33. You're Not Supposed To Die Tonight, by Kalynn Bayron

Owned: No, library Page count: 228 My summary: Charity is a final girl. No, not for real - she plays one at the simulated horror movie game that is Camp Mirror Lake. This season's not going so great, though. She's basically been left alone in charge of a bunch of other teenagers to run this entire operation, and her staff keep ditching her. It's frustrating enough, but then weird things start happening. Shadows on the cameras, strange things in the lake. And suddenly, this camp doesn't feel like a game anymore… My rating: 2.5/5 My commentary:

Ah, Kalynn Bayron. She's an up-and-coming name in YA, but the only other one of her books I've read is Cinderella Is Dead, and I came away from it somewhat disappointed. But I've always felt a little mean for it. After all, Cinderella Is Dead has a defined audience that is very much not my demographic, so it's not really all that surprising that it didn't appeal to me personally. Doesn't mean people who are in that demographic would get nothing out of it! So when I saw this on the shelf at work, I decided to give it a shot. It's a lot closer to being my sort of genres - I like horror, although admittedly slashers aren't my usual style - and the premise of a fake final girl actor becoming a real final girl when a real slasher killer invades her summer camp sounded like an interesting twist on some of the standard slasher tropes. What I got, though? A book that was tropey and formulaic, that didn't really offer anything new over your classic slasher movies. I was kind of bored, and I think that's a massive shame, because there was promise there. So, let's get into it.

I think I can sum up my grievances against this book into two main points, so here they are. Number one - there are too many characters, and none of them are particularly well-defined. Our main character is Charity, and she's joined by a cast of other teens who are stuck at Camp Mirror Lake when they start being stalked by a real slasher killer. The fact that I can't tell you most of their names, or anything about them at all, should be indicative of the kind of story we're talking about here. Look, I know that in slasher horror we tend to paint a deliberately shallow cast of characters so it doesn't really matter when they start getting their faces sliced off, but these characters didn't really have anything going for them. Even Charity - she has a girlfriend, she's got a shitty home life that gets alluded to a couple of times, and she's responsible, but that's literally all I can tell you about her character. In slashers, stereotypically we get characters like The Mean Girl or The Jock or The Nerd, immediately recognisable archetypes so that we can distinguish them quickly. Here, there wasn't any of that, but there also wasn't much of anything. One of the teens liked talking about horror movie cliches? When they started disappearing/being killed off, I almost didn't notice, so ill-defined were they.

And the plot itself has no space to be anything other than the typical slasher-horror beats. Set up the setting and the characters, start making things go wrong and people disappear slowly, then have it build up until these kids are running around in the woods being chased by enigmatic maniacs with knives. It's a short book - in order to make any of its ideas a bit more interesting and fleshed out, or to do any of the deconstructive work that the summary promised, you'd need to double the page count, easy. Things move from A to B to C in perfectly predictable manners. It doesn't help that the beats and twists were either predictable or understated enough that I didn't care about them. One of the other teens was betraying the group the whole time - I didn't see it coming, but I also wasn't able to distinguish the characters enough to tell you which one was most likely to be a traitor. The cops are crooked and the guy running the camp was in on the whole slasher-killer thing - no fucking shit, guy was shady from the start, and the main cop we see was literally named for Matthew Lillard, so he's obviously a secret bad guy. The plot stayed on those rails the whole time, and there wasn't anything else there for me to latch onto. Sorry, Bayron. But this one just wasn't it.

Next up, a look back into history - specifically, the history of female husbands.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight | Author: Kalynn Bayron | Publisher: Bloomsbury (2023)

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With summer on its way out, I thought it would be fun to highlight three books you might have missed! Have you read any of them yet?

You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron Bloomsbury YA

This heart-pounding slasher by New York Times bestselling author Kalynn Bayron is perfect for fans of Fear Street. Charity Curtis has the summer job of her dreams, playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business. But the last weekend of the season, Charity's co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity's role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they'll need figure out what this killer is after. Is there is more to the story of Mirror Lake and its dangerous past than Charity ever suspected? -- Cover image and summary via Goodreads

I'd Rather Burn Than Bloom by Shannon C.F. Rogers

Packed with voice, this is a powerful coming-of-age YA novel about a Filipina-American teen who tries to figure out who she really is in the wake of her mother's death. Some girls call their mother their best friend. Marisol? She could never relate. She and her mom were forever locked in an argument with no beginning and no end. But when her mother dies suddenly, Marisol is left with no one to fight against, haunted by all the things that she both said and didn’t say. And when Marisol sleeps with her best friend's boyfriend—and then punches said best friend in the face—she's left alone, with nothing but a burning anger. And Marisol is determined to stay angry. After all, there’s a lot to be angry about. But as a new friendship begins to develop, Marisol reluctantly starts to open up to her, and to the possibility there’s something else on the other side of that anger—something more to who she is, and who she could be.

Forged by Blood (The Tainted Blood Duology #1) by Ehigbor Okosun Harper Voyager

In the midst of a tyrannical regime and political invasion, Dèmi just wants to survive: to avoid the suspicion of the nonmagical Ajes who occupy her ancestral homeland of Ife; to escape the King’s brutal genocide of her people—the darker skinned, magic wielding Oluso; and to live peacefully with her secretive mother while learning to control the terrifying blood magic that is her birthright. But when Dèmi’s misplaced trust costs her mother’s life, survival gives way to vengeance. She bides her time until the devious Lord Ekwensi grants her the perfect opportunity—kidnap the Aje prince, Jonas, and bargain with his life to save the remaining Oluso. With the help of her reckless childhood friend Colin, Dèmi succeeds, but discovers that she and Jonas share more than deadly secrets; every moment tangles them further into a forbidden, unmistakable attraction, much to Colin’s—and Dèmi’s—distress. The kidnapping is now a joint mission: to return to the King, help get Lord Ekwensi on the council, and bolster the voice of the Oluso in a system designed to silence them. But the way is dangerous, Dèmi’s magic is growing yet uncertain, and it’s not clear if she can trust the two men at her side. A tale of rebellion and redemption, race and class, love and trust and betrayal, Forged by Blood is epic fantasy at its finest, from an enthusiastic, emerging voice. -- Cover image and summary via Goodreads

[roseunspindle]

March 2024 Reading Wrap-up

Very engrossing. Also very vague on who's side is lying the least. ^_^

A fun little addition to the Kane Chronicles. Did want to beg that healer kid to please stop experimenting on themselves. ^_^'

Fun little read, though I think I prefered the drawings to most of the stories.

Finally finished this one. You can tell how unenthusatic Harry is about participating in the tournament. (Also very annoyed with Ron for his BS and even more annoyed with Hermione for pushing mostly Harry into forgiving Ron for being an ass.) Shame on Harry and Ron for their treatment of their dates. I wish Krum would have remained a main character from here on out. I really liked him. Poor Winky.

Three for three so far on me loving Kalynn Bayron's books, this one sucks you in pretty quickly.

Certainly began wondering if any kids were going to die in this book. Also seriously Mr. Mysterious Toyshop owner... full disclosure on the things you see is requested.

re-read, naturally the very beginning of the nod to the gremlins is always hilarious.

Qui-gon is a bit of a dick...not everyone is going to fall to the dark side dude!

Also the Jedi must be doing something wrong where children genuinely feel they are "failures" if they do not become knights. Also the "we are not to know we are to do" massively rankles. I did like the arch Obi-wan went on in the book. Your light saber shouldn't be your only answer to everything.

[island-in-ignorance]

Just finished You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight and wow. If anything this book proved to me that I in no way am emotionally strong enough to be a Final Girl in a horror movie.

I'm so uncoordinated I would take myself out on accident while the Killer just stares at me, slightly amused and mostly annoyed.

[the-dust-jacket]

[slaughter-books]

Day 23: JOMPBPC: Got What They Deserved