Monstrous affections

**STORIES BY M. T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nathan Ballingrud, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Nalo Hopkinson, Dylan Horrocks, Nik Houser, Kathleen Jennings, Alice Sola Kim, Joshua Lewis, Kelly Link, Patrick Ness, and G. Carl Purcell** **P**redatory kraken that sing with--and for--their kin; band members and betrayed friends who happen to be demonic; harpies as likely to attract as repel. Welcome to a world where humans live side by side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you'll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these and monsters that defy categorization, some of today's top authors for young adults explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and revenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders. As in their acclaimed and award-winning anthology *Steampunk!*, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have brought together fifteen of the premier voices in speculative fiction to explore the intersection of fear and love--where the monsters within meet, and sometimes blue into, the monsters without--in a haunting, at times hilarious, darkly imaginative volume. This description comes from the publisher.