If you’ve ever been seventeen, and especially if you’ve ever been seventeen in a small town, you’ve had your own year of dark nights. But when your are seventeen, and especially when you are seventeen in a small town, you believe there is opening before you a mysterious and uncharted realm that exists for you alone. You and your friends are conspirators in a shadow country.

From “In the Dark: Science Fiction in Small Towns" in the wonderful Impossible Owls collection by Brian Phillips.