Show Your Claws: 9 of the Best Monster Girls in YA

Part of Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize series, Eternal is the story of Miranda, a high school theatre nerd who is transformed into a vampire. As the newly-adopted daughter of the highest figure in vampire royalty, the King of the Mantle of Dracul, Miranda indulges her monstrous side by feasting on the innocent — until her conscience starts to catch up with her.

Gu Miyoung, a teenage girl in Seoul, is living a double life. Outwardly, she looks like any other school student but in fact, she is a gumiho, an immortal nine-tailed fox who must eat human energy in order to survive. Miyoung sustains herself by feeding off of evil, predatory men, something that causes more than a little tension with her ruthless mother. However, when she rescues a human boy, Jihoon, her supernatural life crashes into her human existence, with shattering effects for everyone.

The Honeys has the same sun-soaked, creepy horror that made Midsommar so unsettling. Mars, a genderfluid teen who has recently lost his beloved twin sister in a traumatising event, is determined to find out what really happened to her. When Mars travels back to the summer camp that his twin loved, he meets The Honeys, a group of glamorous girls who tend the beehives. While the Honeys initially seem perfect, Mars soon realises that there may be something monstrous lurking below the surface of the whole camp.

While many monster girls in YA are supernatural, some are all too human. In The Midnight Game, a group of six teenagers break into a school to summon “The Midnight Man,” a figure straight out of creepypasta posts who will stalk you and attempt to kill you, but reward you if you survive. However, the real monster of the book is Toni, a teenage girl who, along with her accomplice, has set up the whole scenario in order to live out her thrill-killer dreams.

When Ash Persaud is killed in a car accident, she becomes a Reaper — part of a group of teenage girls who harvest the souls of the recently dead. While the Reapers aren’t traditionally monstrous, they do walk the line between the worlds of the living and the dead, and have to confront the realities of death, including the mortality of their loved ones.

Liar tells the story of Micah, a teenage girl who is a self-admitted compulsive liar. So when she informs the reader that she’s a werewolf who must take medication in order to suppress the monstrous creature inside her, it’s hard to know whether to believe her. But whether Micah is really a werewolf, or just telling another one of her tall tales, some of her actions over the course of the story veer towards the monstrous.

Taking reality TV to its darkest extreme, the first book in Gretchen McNeil’s series set in a dystopian future sees the heroine Dee sent to ‘Alcatraz 2.0’ after being convicted of murdering her sister. This prison island is set up like an ordinary town, except everything is constantly livestreamed, and there are no rules against killing inhabitants. Inmates could be murdered at any moment, for the entertainment of the audience — in order to survive the human monsters that inhabit Alcatraz, Dee has to embrace the monster inside herself.

A retelling of the story of Dracula’s wives, The Deathless Girls follows Lil, a girl from a Traveller community, and her twin sister, Kizzy. The girls are captured and forced to work in the kitchens of a nearby castle, where they hear stories of the Dragon, a fearsome warrior and monster whose interest in the twins threatens to draw them into his supernatural world.

In Namina Forna’s fantasy world, a repressive regime ensures that teenage girls are tested for purity by having their blood spilled. When Deka is tested, she bleeds gold, proof that she is part demon — however, before the other people in her village can kill her, she is offered a place in the Imperial army. The alaki, as they are known, are a military force of part-demon teenage girls — but in defending their country, they risk becoming truly monstrous.