In Vienna in 1911 Gustav Klimt finds a woman's body in the Danube canal and, while sketching her, she coughs and proves alive. Back at his studio Klimt and his model Wally tend the nearly feral woman who cannot remember who she is, and he names her Judith. She recalls being stranded in the Arctic a century earlier, locked in a crate by Victor Frankenstein and visiting the Underworld. Many people pursue her, including Geoff, a giant croissant eating devil dog of the North.

In a bleak, ash-choked postapocalyptic landscape, a nameless father and his young son travel south along a ruined highway, scavenging for food and warmth while avoiding marauders and the desperate, cannibalistic remnants of humanity; the father struggles to protect his child and teach him compassion and moral restraint even as their hope dwindles, and their bond—love, fear, and relentless determination—becomes the story’s central pulse amid pervasive loss and the question of what it means to remain human.

Emily Brand, a physicist, makes a major energy discovery and then disappears. Her research partner dies in a plane crash and a brutally ambitious oil executive, David Lucci, uses NARCON to prevent her from going public. He resorts to torture, blackmail, and murder to make her pay for what she did to him over twenty years ago.

A lonely eighth-grade half-vampire struggles to keep his true nature secret while navigating bullies, a loyal friend, and the humiliations of middle school; as mysterious threats and his own violent urges intrude on everyday life, he must confront painful secrets from his past and make difficult moral choices about who he will become.

The novel is set in the sequestered, eccentric, amiably self-indulged WASP world of Old Hampton, Long Island. The Hampton sisters are rich, desirable, and single, yet their shabby-genteel shorefront estate reeks of murder and madness. Lydia is a gentle recluse and amateur ornithologist. Emily is a star amateur tennis player and budding novelist whose amorous manipulations take her and her lovers between Manhattan's fast-paced publishing world and the leisurely country club of Old Hampton.