Night Children Prowl MegaMall

SF author Kit Reed told SCI FI Wire that her latest novel, The Night Children, is a book for young adults and explores the idea that there are people who live by night in places most of us see only in the daytime.

"I can't say exactly where this came from, ... but I probably owe a lot to John Collier's 'Evening Primrose,' about sub-colonies living in Philadelphia's department stores," Reed said in an interview. "It hit me like a ton of bricks when I was a kid."

Reed remembers being 6 years old and hating it every time an adult relative condescended to her. "I was little and helpless, and I remember swearing, 'I will never forget what it's like to be a kid,'" she said. "And, inside, I'm still that same person. And to that kid, the idea of lost and orphaned kids living on their own in the biggest mall in the world was a natural."

There are three central characters in The Night Children: Jule, a girl who gets locked inside the tremendous mall after closing time; Tick, the boy who leads the Crazies, one of the many kid tribes living in the Castertown MegaMall; and the mysterious Lance the Loner. "Together, they'll battle evil Amos Zozz, the warped tycoon who built the monstrous commercial palace for his own sinister reasons," Reed said.

In The Night Children the MegaMall the characters inhabit looks architecturally like a giant honeycomb that is still expanding, Reed said. Everything is linked by tunnels, and an underground river is used both by the Night Children and the few privileged adults who know about it. "Then there is the matter of escape routes and, before that, the security 'surveillcam,' which is how Amos controls his little commercial universe," she said.

The Night Children grew up alongside Reed's new adult novel, Enclave, which is forthcoming in February. "Although most of the principals in Enclave are adults, it unfolds in a mountaintop school for impossible rich kids, and a 12-year-old supergeek and dedicated online gamer [of] MMORPGs plays a major role," she said. "A mysterious stranger appears. The server crashes and at the same time, people start getting sick ... "

-John Joseph Adams