Books Young Adult Spotlight Most Anticipated Young Adult SFF/H for September & October 2025 Fall is right around the corner, bringing a slew of dark and cryptic stories… By Alex Brown | Published on September 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share It may be Surface of the Sun degrees outside, but fall is right around the corner. With the change in seasons comes a slew of dark and cryptic stories. Interestingly, supernatural beasties seem to be making a comeback, as is eco-horror. Come for the murder, stay for the romance. My twenty most anticipated young adult fantasy, science fiction, and horror novels will make you shiver with both anticipation and revulsion. Anthologies This Is How We Roll edited by Rosiee Thor(Page Street YA; September 16, 2025) Love tabletop roll playing games? Then this is the anthology for you! Thor has lined up a great list of well-known queer YA authors to tell stories about the joys and community bonds of TTRPG. With topics like mental health, family, queerness, neurodivergence, and accepting people for who they are, there are a lot of entry points for readers. I’m not personally a TTRPG person, but this anthology sounds like a lot of fun. Authors include: Rosiee Thor, Akemi Dawn Bowman, DeAndra Davis, M.K. England, Jonny Garza Villa, Anna Meriano, Linsey Miller, Margaret Owen, Marieke Nijkamp, Jamie Pacton, Rebecca Podos, Tara Sim, Andrew Joseph White. These Bodies Ain’t Broken edited by Madeline Dyer(Page Street YA; October 7, 2025) It’s been a while since we’ve had a YA anthology centered on disability stories. If I’m not mistaken, the other big one is 2018’s Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens. This new collection explores disability through the lens of horror, not in the sense that disabled bodies are a problem or “broken” but telling horror stories with main characters whose disabilities impact the story in some way. Physical disabilities in particular are very underrepresented in YA fiction across the board, so this anthology is addressing a big need. Authors include: Dana Mele, Lillie Lainoff, Soumi Roy, Anandi, Fin Leary, S.E. Anderson, K. Ancrum, Pintip Dunn, Lily Meade, Mo Netz, P.H. Low, and Carly Nugent. Magic with a Twist Extraordinary Quests for Amateur Witches by Kayla Cottingham(Delacorte Press; September 23, 2025) Things seem to be going well for Kieran, until he accidentally curses his ex-boyfriend, rendering Kieran invisible to him. To stay on the Witches Council’s good side, he announces that he plans to discover a magical panacea that will break all curses. Now he actually has to do it. Kieran, his sister, and her girlfriend set off on an aeroship adventure alongside a handsome crewmate Sebanstian. But they aren’t alone on this quest; an evil capitalist will do whatever it takes to get his greedy little mitts on the cure first. Blood & Breath by Qurratulayn(Page Street YA; October 7, 2025) No one knows that Evan is Magi, but her secret is at risk when she’s attacked one night and left for dead. Her attacker is a Necro, basically the antithesis of Magi. With her final breath, she makes a deal with a devil, Jack, to trade her life for revenge. Jack helps Evan bluff her way into the Necros organization. At first her plan is to destroy them all, but when she unexpectedly catches feelings for one of them, things get complicated. Set in a 1920s New Orleans-style fantasy world. Hazelthorn by CG Drews(Feiwel & Friends; October 28, 2025) Evander, a sickly orphan, lives on the lavish estate of a reclusive billionaire, but he feels like a prisoner. He’s forbidden from leaving the property, banned from the estate garden, and not allowed to be alone with his guardian’s grandson Laurie, the boy who tried to kill him a few years before. After Byron’s death, Evander is shocked to learn he will inherit the property, not Laurie. The two teens form a tenuous alliance to protect each other from swarming relatives and figure out who killed their guardian. Whatever is going on, the garden is at the center of it. Into the Woods Hollow by Taylor Grothe(Peachtree Teen; September 30, 2025) When her family moved away from their small town in New York, Cassie lost touch with her friends. But after an incident at school leads to her finally getting diagnosed with autism, her parents split up and her mom drags her back to Deep Glen. In an attempt to rekindle her relationships with friends she’d lost touch with when she moved away, Cassie agrees to go camping with them. Cut to a big fight that ends with her alone and lost in the woods. She’s rescued by Kaleb, a member of an unsettling off-the-grid community called the Roost. At first it’s a relief to be around people who support her neurodiversity, but the Roost is not what it seems. A Feast for the Eyes by Alex Crespo(Peachtree Teen; October 7, 2025) Like many small towns, the coastal Oregon town of Pine Cove has a local legend: the Watcher. As the story goes, the Watcher hunts down people with big secrets. When girlfriends Lauren and Shay have a fight in the forest near town, the Watcher attacks and Lauren barely escapes with her life. Now Shay has to prove the legend is real. With the help of her friend Zoe, a photography student struggling to find her eye, and their friends, Shay goes on a monster hunt.  He’s So Possessed With Me by Corey Liu(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; October 14, 2025) Colin Ong is convinced his best friend Ren Hsu is possessed. The two best friends had just wrapped up an evening of clubbing when they followed a distressed boy into the woods. Something grabbed Ren, and when Colin finally tracked him down deep in the forest…well, Colin doesn’t exactly know. His memory ends there. What he does know is that Ren came out of the woods different than when he went in and the enigmatic boy now pursuing a relationship with Ren is wicked to his core. This sounds a little like The Summer Hikaru Died, and I’m into it. Thrills & Chills Who’s All Going (to Die)? by Lisa Springer(Delacorte Press; September 16, 2025) Freshman college student Ariana is still recovering from an injury that waylaid her volleyball career in high school. The parents of her new friend Oakley invite the two young women to stay at their teen-centered wellness program at a fancy resort on a private island near Barbados. At first, everything seems perfect, but red flags keep popping up…as do the dead bodies. The teen visitors are surveilled constantly, the contract they signed is unbreakable, and the white woman wellness “guru,” Juniper-Moon, might actually be a cult leader. Make Me a Monster by Kalynn Bayron(Bloomsbury YA; October 14, 2025) With a new mortician’s assistant license in hand, Meka starts working at her parents’ funeral home. But with the tragic death of someone she loves, she comes face to face with the dark secrets her parents have kept from her about their work. Strange things start happening around her like birds flocking to her house and creepy items left at her front door. Worse, the dead are roaming around. Loosely inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Showstopper by Lily Anderson(Henry Holt & Co BYR; September 30, 2025) Afro-Boricua teen Faye is so excited for her annual summer excursion to Ghostlight Youth Theater Camp with her besties. However, things get off to a rocky start when the camp director dies unexpectedly. Soon, more bodies turn up and Faye is the only one who realizes something is very, very wrong. Accusations start flying, and Faye has to not only clear her name but save the day. Vamps & Shifters Blood Moon by Britney S. Lewis(Page Street YA; September 9, 2025) A long time ago, the Kansas town of Timber Plains was saved from a vampire attack by werewolves. Or so the legend goes. Like any good normie who suddenly finds themself in a fantasy story, Mira doesn’t believe the legend. At the start of her freshman year of college at the local university, she meets Julian, a boy who is mad at her for reasons she can’t understand. After Julian saves her life through an impossible feat of strength, Mira realizes there might be some truth to the urban legend after all. Turns out her mother’s disappearance five years before was part of a much bigger war simmering under the surface of the town. A Steeping of Blood by Hafsah Faizal(Blood and Tea  #2 — Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR); September 23, 2025) There are several vampire books coming out this fall that are on my radar, but I just love the premise of this duology so much. By the end of the first book, Arthie and her brother Jin had succeeded in their mission to expose the identity and misdeeds of the Ram—the masked ruler of the colonizer country of Atenia—but not yet managed to knock the Ram out of power. Now Arthie and her ragtag band of human and vampire allies are off on another heist, this time to the country she immigrated from, Ceylan.  The Transition by Logan-Ashley Kisner(Delacorte Press; September 30, 2025) A trans horror werewolf story, OMG, inject it into my eyeballs! Hunter, a trans teen who has finally gotten top surgery but who is also still dealing with messy feelings about gender, is attacked by a werewolf one night. As his body starts to change beyond his control, he and his friends Mars and Gabe realize they have to find the creature that infected him with lycanthropy and kill it before the change becomes permanent. But does he actually want to be human? Being a bloodthirsty werewolf is awfully tempting. Not helping matters is the discovery that the werewolf can communicate telepathically with Hunter.  ‘Tis Almost Fairy Time Bad in the Blood by Matteo L. Cerilli(Tundra Books; September 2, 2025) The fey like you’ve never seen them before. In the 1920s-inspired city of Puck’s Port, siblings Gristle and Hawthorne are one of  hundreds with Faerie Disorder. The fey can do wild magic yet are treated like second class citizens compared to humans. Hawthorne spends most of her time masking and passing, while Gristle devotes himself to working as a private investigator like his father did before his tragic death. When another fey is blamed for a murder, the Stregoni siblings start a desperate search for the real killer before the city erupts into violence against the fey.  All the Stars in the Daylight Sky by Maya MacGregor(Astra Young Readers; October 28, 2025) Cam, who is both agender and autistic, splits their time between their homes in Texas and Scotland, never feeling settled in either place. During a visit to Scotland, they encounter the fae and are pulled into a strange, fantastical world of possibilities. The fae sees them for who they really are, but holding onto that acceptance means leaving their human family behind. This sounds like a unique take on romantasy. Waterworld The Dead of Summer by Ryan La Sala(The Dead of Summer #1 — PUSH; September 16, 2025) Now that Ollie’s mom is free of cancer, they’re headed to a tourist island off the coast of Maine, Anchor’s Mercy. What is supposed to be a summer of fun and celebration sours when a storm cuts off the island’s electricity. Soon, a terrible illness begins spreading around town, turning those infected into zombie-like beings who appear to drown even when not in water. With the island locked down, Ollie and his friends have the fight of their lives to survive the plague. The Others by Cheryl Isaacs (The Unfinished #2 — Heartdrum; September 16, 2025) The sequel opens just two weeks after the end of the first book. Avery and Key are now a couple, and the beings from Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) stories are finally at rest. Or are they? The black lake in the dark woods is placid now, but locals are still dealing with the ripple effects of grief and trauma. Something weird is going on with the fountain in the town square, and strange shapes haunt Avery in reflective surfaces. To sort out what’s really going on, she’ll have to go back to the lake where all the horrors began. And the River Drags Her Down by Jihyun Yun(Knopf Books for Young Readers; October 7, 2025) Soojin’s family has the inexplicable magical ability to resurrect the dead. Before her sudden death in a car accident when they were kids, Soojin’s mother warned her daughters to never revive anything bigger than a small animal. But when, years later, her sister Mirae is found dead in the river that runs through their small Northern California coastal town, Soojin breaks the rules. She’s thrilled that Mirae is back from the dead, but something isn’t quite right with her undead sister. As locals in their predominately white town start dying horrible deaths, Mirae’s thirst for revenge becomes uncontrollable. An Ocean Apart by Jill Tew(Joy Revolution; October 14, 2025) It’s 2190 and Miami has been destroyed by climate change induced flooding. The wealthiest families, known as Cruisers, live on gigantic ships where they have the privilege of ignoring all the damage they’ve done to the world. Eden survives on the marshes left behind by the floodwaters and plots revenge. She gets her opening when a Cruiser family announces a dating competition for their son, Theo. She sneaks in undercover to seduce Theo and steal his money, but things get complicated when they fall for each other. [end-mark] The post Most Anticipated Young Adult SFF/H for September & October 2025 appeared first on Reactor.