The Night Children
Inside the Castertown MegaMall, the biggest mall in the world, live the night children — runaways, abandoned kids, kids who got lost and were never found. They only come out at night, after all the shoppers are gone.
When thirteen-year-old Jule Devereaux visits the mall after the mysterious disappearance of her aunt, she becomes a pawn in the war between two gangs of night children: the Castertown Crazies, led by the stalwart Tick Stiles, and the Dingos, whose leader is the batty Burt Arno. What the night children don’t realize is that the megalomaniacal owner of the MegaMall, billionaire Amos Zozz, knows all about them. To him, they are vermin — “rats” living in his beautiful mall — and he has plans to exterminate them. Julie, Tick, and Burt must join forces if they want to survive...
Kit Reed
Kit Reed (1932-2017) was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.
Reed was born on June 7, 1932 in San Diego, California. Her first short story, "The Wait" (1958), was published by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation.
The New York Times Book Review said about her short fiction in 2006: "Reed has a prose style that's pure dry ice, displayed in dystopian stories that specialize in bitterness and dislocation." The Wall Street Journal said: "The title of Kit Reed's [2013] selection of her own short stories, The Story Until Now (Wesleyan), reminds us that although she has been writing award-winning fiction for some 50 years, she's still accelerating. The scope of these 35 stories is immense, their variety unmatched."