Night Owls book store is the one spot on campus open late enough to help out even the most practiced slacker. The employees’ penchant for fighting the evil creatures of the night is just a perk…

Valerie McTeague’s business model is simple: provide the students of Edgewood College with a late-night study haven and stay as far away from the underworld conflicts of her vampire brethren as possible. She’s lived that life, and the price she paid was far too high to ever want to return.

Elly Garrett hasn’t known any life except that of fighting the supernatural werewolf-like beings known as Creeps or Jackals. But she always had her mentor and foster father by her side—until he gave his life protecting a book that the Creeps desperately want to get their hands on.

When the book gets stashed at Night Owls for safe keeping, those Val holds nearest and dearest are put in mortal peril. Now Val and Elly will have to team up, along with a mismatched crew of humans, vampires, and lesbian succubi, to stop the Jackals from getting their claws on the book and unleashing unnamed horrors…

This anthology includes 120 authors—who contributed 230 works totaling

approximately 1.1 million words of fiction. These pieces all originally

appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the

SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next

generation of speculative storytelling.

All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New

Writer in 2016. We hope you’ll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for

that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.