HORROR: JAMES GRAINGER

Apart in the Dark: Novellas By Ania Ahlborn Simon & Schuster, 370 pages, $22

Ania Ahlborn’s work occupies that grey area between adult and young-adult fiction: her themes are more sophisticated than those of YA novels and her protagonists older, but her conversational authorial voice and the struggle to “fit in” feel aimed at teenage readers. The two novellas contained in “Apart in the Dark” slide comfortably into that in-between groove. “The Pretty Ones” follows the downward spiral of a wallflower office worker in New York during the infamous Summer of Sam in 1977, while “I Call Upon Thee” is a more traditional gothic ghost story about the havoc wreaked by a haunted doll. Ahlborn is an undeniably gifted storyteller who knows how to breathe life into familiar horror tropes.

Anna By Niccolo Ammaniti, Jonathan Hunt, translator Canongate, 270 pages, $21.95

Niccolo Ammaniti is a literary superstar in his native Italy. In “Anna,” he radically upends the typical postapocalyptic narrative by focusing not only on the terrors unleashed by a global catastrophe — in this case, a virus that kills everyone over the age of 14 — but the exhilarating freedom that comes in the wake of a total societal collapse. The novel is set in Sicily, where 11-year-old Anna struggles to provide for herself and her younger brother.