|
<< BACK TO LAUGHING BOY BOOKS | BOOKSHOP UPDATES >>
NAVIGATE THIS PAGE: "Paranormal" vs. "Supernatural" | The Real Life Murder Story Behind My Reincarnation Novel | Review: The Graveyard Book | Related Book List: Supernatural YA | Related Book List: Fantasy YA | More Paranormal Young Adult Books on Bookshop >>
NAVIGATE THIS PAGE: "Paranormal" vs. "Supernatural" | The Real Life Murder Story Behind My Reincarnation Novel | Review: The Graveyard Book | Related Book List: Supernatural YA | Related Book List: Fantasy YA | More Paranormal Young Adult Books on Bookshop >>
"PARANORMAL" VS. "SUPERNATURAL"
Because YA is a classification of books geared toward younger readers, it can span many genres, or even combine them. This can make defining certain types of YA very tricky. What qualifies as "supernatural" versus "paranormal" is a great example, as the terms are often used interchangeably.
For the purposes of my bookshop, I have adopted a more narrow definition of these terms:
Paranormal: related to phenomena beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding, including extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis, reincarnation, ghosts, hauntings, astral projection, poltergeists activity, etc. Titles related to these topics can be found on this page.
Supernatural: Relating to manifestations, entities or events that do not exist in nature or are pulled from legend or myth. This may including witchcraft, magic, mythical beings, monsters or demons such as werewolves and vampires. For titles dealing with these and related topics, please see my Supernatural YA booklist.
Additional titles that deal with paranormal and supernatural phenomena can be found on my Fantasy YA booklist.
Because YA is a classification of books geared toward younger readers, it can span many genres, or even combine them. This can make defining certain types of YA very tricky. What qualifies as "supernatural" versus "paranormal" is a great example, as the terms are often used interchangeably.
For the purposes of my bookshop, I have adopted a more narrow definition of these terms:
Paranormal: related to phenomena beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding, including extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis, reincarnation, ghosts, hauntings, astral projection, poltergeists activity, etc. Titles related to these topics can be found on this page.
Supernatural: Relating to manifestations, entities or events that do not exist in nature or are pulled from legend or myth. This may including witchcraft, magic, mythical beings, monsters or demons such as werewolves and vampires. For titles dealing with these and related topics, please see my Supernatural YA booklist.
Additional titles that deal with paranormal and supernatural phenomena can be found on my Fantasy YA booklist.
Denise and her parents are fixing up an old, rundown house. But when floors collapse, objects rain down, and she hears creepy voices, it's clear something sinister lurks here.
Two women and separated by centuries yet inextricably linked by the Gullah-Geechee Islands and an extraordinary gift passed from generation to generation.
Maddie Fynn is a shy high school junior cursed with an eerie intuitive ability that's out of her control — one that entangles her in a homicide investigation...
Tyler's not the type of teenager who spends much time considering the paranormal. But when Sawyer enters his group home, it leads Tyler down a path where lifetimes overlap.
Jake can't decide what's worse: being a medium forced to watch the dead play out their last moments or being at the mercy of racist teachers as one of the few Black students at St. Clair Prep.
A full-color graphic novel adaptation of one of Mary Downing Hahn's most popular ghost stories where mischievous siblings pretend their grandmother's inn is haunted and awaken the real spirits.
THE REAL MURDER STORY BEHIND MY REINCARNATION NOVEL:
My first YA novel, His Life Abiding, was published in 2013. On its ten year anniversary, I took a look back at the real murder case of a German POW during World War II that inspired the mystery central to the book's plot.
If you’ve read this paranormal mystery, you know the plot revolves around the capture, imprisonment and subsequent murder of a German POW named Ehren Tschantz during World War II. In the author’s note at the end of the book, I wrote that Tschantz’s story was based on the U.S. military’s practice of using captured Germans with anti-Nazi feelings as “stool pigeons” to extract information from other prisoners. What I didn’t reveal was my family's weird connection to the actual murder case that inspired His Life Abiding.
To explain this, I need to go back to 1998 when The History Channel premiered a documentary entitled America’s Last Mass Execution. Based on the book Martial Justice: America’s Last Mass Execution by Richard Whittingham, the film chronicled in part the capture and murder of a German prisoner of war named Werner Drechsler.
And this is where everything started... MORE.
My first YA novel, His Life Abiding, was published in 2013. On its ten year anniversary, I took a look back at the real murder case of a German POW during World War II that inspired the mystery central to the book's plot.
If you’ve read this paranormal mystery, you know the plot revolves around the capture, imprisonment and subsequent murder of a German POW named Ehren Tschantz during World War II. In the author’s note at the end of the book, I wrote that Tschantz’s story was based on the U.S. military’s practice of using captured Germans with anti-Nazi feelings as “stool pigeons” to extract information from other prisoners. What I didn’t reveal was my family's weird connection to the actual murder case that inspired His Life Abiding.
To explain this, I need to go back to 1998 when The History Channel premiered a documentary entitled America’s Last Mass Execution. Based on the book Martial Justice: America’s Last Mass Execution by Richard Whittingham, the film chronicled in part the capture and murder of a German prisoner of war named Werner Drechsler.
And this is where everything started... MORE.
Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead. He travels the country to destroy the murderous dead, and keep pesky things like the future and friends at bay.
When Lacy wakes up dead in Westminster Cemetery, a young soldier who died in 1865 teaches her the rules of the afterlife and warns her about a punishment worse than death.
Once a year, a road appears in the forest. At the end of it, the ghost of Lucy Gallows beckons. If you win Lucy's game, you escape with your life. But if you lose....
All nature of ghosts, haunts, spirits, and specters are appearing throughout London, and they aren't exactly friendly. Only young people have the psychic abilities required to see and eradicate these supernatural foes.
As Laurie's perfect summer comes to a close, things start to unravel when her boyfriend insists he saw her out with another guy! More mysterious sightings convince Laurie someone very real is out there, watching her. . .
Ilana Lopez, a biracial Jewish girl, discovers a forgotten Jewish cemetery behind her aunt's cottage. There she meets the ghost of a kindhearted boy who introduces her to the enchanted side of Prague.
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography.
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. When ghosts start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into the city's innards and expose its guts to the world!
First published in 1959, this book has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror when four people encounter with a house filled with inexplicable phenomena. And soon, it will choose one of them to make its own!
In 1920s England, a working-class girl who can see spirits works with a lord's son to solve mysterious deaths at the local manor home in this eerie historical mystery.
A boy and dog trapped aboard the legendary ship, the Flying Dutchman, are sent to roam the earth in search of those in need.
No one wants to cross Blossom Cup, especially now that she's revealed that she can see the Unseen. Then Blossom herself is stunned, because her lie turns out to be truth.
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
By Neil Gaiman (author), Dave McKean (illustrator)
MY REVIEW: If a story about an orphaned boy, the soul survivor of a mass murder, being raised by the residents of a haunted graveyard sounds ghoulish, well, it is. But would you also believe it's charming?
Appropriately called The Graveyard Book, this 2008 novel is by English author Neil Gaiman who's best known for his macabre masterpiece, Coraline (2002). The Graveyard Book was his first full length novel after Coraline and it shares some of the same grim themes.
The story begins on the night of the murder when the young protagonist manages to free himself from his crib and wander out into the night just as a shadowy killer called "the man Jack" is doing in his mother, father and older sister. The tot ends up at the gates of the cemetery at the top of the hill, where the ghostly residents gather to debate his fate. In many ways, the cemetery is the book's central character. Lavishly detailed by Gaiman, the reader comes to know every nook and cranny of the place, and appreciate it not just as a domicile for spooks, but as a refuge for the living. Bestowed with "the freedom of the graveyard," Bod is able to move about its confines safely, interacting with both the dead and the various types of wildlife which inhabit its wooded hills.
But it's never quite the same as having living, breathing people around. So Bod is particularly excited when he befriends a girl named Scarlett who lives in the nearby village and comes to the graveyard to play. Bod's friendship with Scarlett makes him long even more to explore the outside world. But Silas is quick to remind him "the man Jack" who killed his parents is still at large and still hunting him. The Graveyard Book is a compelling, often touching novel with themes and characters young adults will gobble up. Gaiman is particularly adept at constructing compelling dialogue and historical dialects. In fact, if I can bestow a high compliment, he's the best I've found at this since I read Robert Louis Stevenson as a teenager.
By Neil Gaiman (author), Dave McKean (illustrator)
MY REVIEW: If a story about an orphaned boy, the soul survivor of a mass murder, being raised by the residents of a haunted graveyard sounds ghoulish, well, it is. But would you also believe it's charming?
Appropriately called The Graveyard Book, this 2008 novel is by English author Neil Gaiman who's best known for his macabre masterpiece, Coraline (2002). The Graveyard Book was his first full length novel after Coraline and it shares some of the same grim themes.
The story begins on the night of the murder when the young protagonist manages to free himself from his crib and wander out into the night just as a shadowy killer called "the man Jack" is doing in his mother, father and older sister. The tot ends up at the gates of the cemetery at the top of the hill, where the ghostly residents gather to debate his fate. In many ways, the cemetery is the book's central character. Lavishly detailed by Gaiman, the reader comes to know every nook and cranny of the place, and appreciate it not just as a domicile for spooks, but as a refuge for the living. Bestowed with "the freedom of the graveyard," Bod is able to move about its confines safely, interacting with both the dead and the various types of wildlife which inhabit its wooded hills.
But it's never quite the same as having living, breathing people around. So Bod is particularly excited when he befriends a girl named Scarlett who lives in the nearby village and comes to the graveyard to play. Bod's friendship with Scarlett makes him long even more to explore the outside world. But Silas is quick to remind him "the man Jack" who killed his parents is still at large and still hunting him. The Graveyard Book is a compelling, often touching novel with themes and characters young adults will gobble up. Gaiman is particularly adept at constructing compelling dialogue and historical dialects. In fact, if I can bestow a high compliment, he's the best I've found at this since I read Robert Louis Stevenson as a teenager.
Henry James wrote eighteen weird and ambiguously supernatural stories about phantom women in black veils, haunted clothes guarded by a jealous ghost, evil doppelgangers, and murderous portraits.
Shady Grove inherited her father's ability to call ghosts from the grave with his fiddle, but she also knows the fiddle's tunes bring nothing but trouble and darkness.
Aspooky mystery about a girl detective who must decode a series of ominous clues tied to a century-old tragedy to find a missing teenager before it's too late…
Dahl was fascinated by the classic ghost story. He read some 749 supernatural tales at the British Museum Library before selecting the 14 that comprise this anthology.
When Sophia was 12, she starred in her older sister Layla's amateur horror movie in an infamous haunted house. Years later, she must once again confront the ghosts of her childhood. But the house won't reveal its secrets without a fight.
What Josh thought would be the dullest summer of his life turns chilling when he meets the ghost of a coal miner killed in a mine explosion.