Some of them might scare you, they may even steal your sleep, and others might touch you somewhere down deep. None is the same but one thing’s for sure, there will be monsters till the last page is turned. “Slasher Girls and Monster Boys” is a collection of chilling short stories written by some of the most popular young adult authors in bookstores today.

With the scaring season just around the corner, young adult novelist April Genevieve Tucholke has brought together some highly entertaining stories that are great for readers who love a good scare.

When putting together a collection of short stories there are a number of different ways to go about connecting them for one book.

The person or persons putting them together can agree to have separate stories that all relate to each other, or they can have completely different stories that revolve around one central theme. In the case of “Slasher Girls and Monster Boys” the stories have two things that allow them to work together.

The first, and the most interesting thing about “Slasher Girls and Monster Boys,” is that each of the stories in the collection was inspired by other stories from throughout the years. The authors pulled inspiration from other forms of media, varying from something that would make you never want to sleep again to something a four-year-old child could watch.

In addition to the authors emulating other stories, there is also a supernatural component to each story, with all sorts of monsters. These factors tie the fourteen pieces together into one frightening collection.

In the process of working through each individual story, I felt that the book as a whole started off strong and slowly fizzled out. From “The Birds of Azelea Street” by Ren Suma to “Hide and Seek” by Megan Shepherd, I was enchanted by the creativity the authors put into their stories and was constantly wondering what original stories they had chosen to work into their final pieces. After that the stories were not necessarily badly written, they just didn’t grab this reader’s attention as much as the stories at the beginning of the book.

The good thing about reading a book of short stories like this is that you don’t miss out on anything when you choose to skip over a story. If a reader picks up this book for the scaring season I hope they walk away enjoying some of the stories, because these authors really did put a lot of creativity and heart into them.