What should I put here?
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Having just gone through the rules, I'm not quite seeing a violation. Might be smart to point out what was actually wrong.
As for the topic at hand, I think the issue is that traditional YA stuff rarely tackles things that are outside the experience of the reader. Sure, the main character(s) may go off on an adventure, but the meat of the story is still about them interacting with each other. The most important thing is to simply write a story. Whether or not it comes out as YA fiction is down to how well you plan it out.
These kind of things are normally dictated more by your skill as an author; there's no mixture of genres/concepts that simply cannot work, only people that cannot make them work.
I write stuff sometimes. I also sometimes make youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/majormarks
That's a thump, not something I'm telling the OP.
What should I put here?
Yeah, I got that now.
Hmm... I haven't read them myself, but, courtesy of Writing Excuses, I've heard a good bit about I Am Not A Serial Killer and its sequels by Dan Wells, and they're supposed to be pretty creepy (and they are, quite definitely, classed as horror).
Trans Siberian Anarchestra (it/they)
I Am Not A Serial Killer is excellent, and is indeed YA horror (mixed with urban fantasy).
It should probably be noted that advertising your story as horror is probably more detrimental in the eyes of that public than claiming it as YA.
The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable
Apparition in the Woods
Just pitch it as a horror/suspense novel that happens to have high-schoolers as the main characters. Let the publishers figure out how to market it once you've sold it; until that point, just think about your story on its own terms.
I'll hide your name inside a word and paint your eyes with false perception.
So I've been working on my novel, Persistent Silence, for approximately a year now. The main characters are high school students because, well, I'm pretty young and write what you know, after all, so I've headed it as a YA story. But it doesn't fit in with a lot of the YA I've seen and read, because it's a horror story and I feel like I'm going against the grain when I'm writing it. Has anyone else heard of a truly scary YA book? Or should I stop saying it's YA? I've heard a lot of people trashing YA as "lesser literature" and I want my story to be taken seriously, hence my confusion.