7 of Our Favorite Eerie Small Towns in YA

Bone Gap (Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby)
In the flyspeck midwestern town of Bone Gap, the corn whispers, eccentrics abound, and the boundary between the real and the impossible is dangerously thin. A beautiful young woman named Roza, fleeing from some dark history, washes up inside Bone Gap’s borders, but it can’t serve as a refuge forever. When she’s stolen away, the town’s resident oddball, Finn, is the only one who has any chance of finding her, with the help of a fantastical horse, a bee-eyed girl, and his own strange way of viewing the world.

Portero (Bleeding Violet, by Dia Reeves)
In the opening pages of Bleeding Violet, bipolar heroine Hanna shows up in tiny Portero, Texas, in search of her estranged mom on the heels of her father’s death. But Portero isn’t a place where she can lick her wounds. The hostile townspeople expect her to either move along quickly…or fall prey to Portero’s monsters, which come through from portals to other worlds. Portero sizzles with weirdness, but Hanna is no stranger to the bizarre and frightening, and she just might be the heroine it needs.

Quivira (Blood and Salt, by Kim Liggett)
Ash Larkin and her twin brother were raised by a single mother, a refugee from a commune in Quivira, Kansas, who fled while pregnant to New York City. But Ash is plagued by bloody visions of a strung-up dead girl who shares her face, and her mom’s protective charms grow less effective against them with each passing year. So when her mom goes missing just after Ash receives her most intense vision yet, she and her brother strike out for Quivira, tucked away in a sea of rustling corn. There she encounters a tiny community of families who’ve waited centuries for a frightening prophecy to come to pass—as well as the boy who threatens to make her fall too hard and too fast, until she’s all in, blood and salt. Between the uncanny corn and the cultish townspeople, Quivira is not a place for outsiders—or a place where insiders can get out.

Unnamed upstate town (Imaginary Girls, by Nova Ren Suma)
In a tiny town in upstate New York, on the shores of an eerie reservoir, a gorgeous wild girl named Ruby has far more power over people and reality than she should. Her younger sister, Chloe, who feels like a “photocopy” of her It Girl sister, is back from a two-year sojourn in her dad’s house in another state, which she fled to after witnessing a tragedy one night at the reservoir. Now, back within her sister’s beguiling orbit, she learns that Ruby will go to any length to keep her happy and close—even if it means bending the rules of what’s possible. The book’s dreamy atmosphere sucks you in and holds you tight, till Ruby and Chloe’s hometown feels as airtight and inescapable as the drowned town of Olive, whose ruins sleep far beneath the surface of the reservoir.

Winterfold (White Crow, by Marcus Sedgwick)
You can check into Winterfold, but you might never leave. Rebecca is forced to abandon her life in London to take up residence in the eerie seaside town, where she befriends the fascinating, deeply odd Ferelith, a girl who knows Winterfold’s secrets and lures Rebecca down an increasingly perilous path. Two hundred years earlier, a Winterfold priest is ensorcelled by his own dark companion; the story of their deadly collaboration is told through a series of diary entries. Past or present, Winterfold is a place of deadly secrets, haunted by the maddening beat of the sea.

Gardnerville (Don’t You Forget About Me, by Kate Karyus Quinn)
Gardnerville is a small-town Shangri-la, a place where people grow old without growing sick, and few who live there ever choose to leave. The worm in the apple: every four years, Gardnerville’s teens are afflicted with a supernatural curse, which drives one or two of them mad or even murderous. Four years ago, Skylar’s older sister, Piper, led a group of teens to their deaths before disappearing. Now it’s another dangerous fourth year, and it’s time for Skylar to stop popping forget-me-not pills and start investigating her memories of what happened that night.

Elsewhere (Elsewhere, by Gabrielle Zevin)
The little town of Elsewhere isn’t creepy, exactly, but it’s not a place I want to go anytime soon. The newly dead take a cruise ship to its balmy shores, and when they arrive they must make a decision: make a life in Elsewhere, where you age backward until you retreat into babyhood and are sent back to earth for another round—and, in the meantime, you can play chess with Marilyn Monroe, catch up with dead relatives, and maybe get a job at a pet shelter—or remain obsessed with the earthly life you left, watching your loved ones through magical telescopes and plotting ways to get close enough to haunt them. Liz goes the latter route, before slowly coming around to her new existence. This elegiac, singular book is deeply moving, and will stay with you for days.