"It started with a single child, and quickly spread: you could get high by drinking your own shadow. At night, lights were destroyed so that addicts could sip shadow in the pure light of the moon. Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds, rounded up old ladies from retirement homes. Cities were destroyed and governments fell. If your shadow was consumed by addicts, you were forced to sip shadows yourself, or go mad. Now it is 150 years later, and what's left of the world is divided between the highly regimented life of those inside dome-cities that are protected from natural light, and those forced to the dangerous, hardscrabble life in the wilds outside. In rural Texas, Mira hunts shadow from animals for her bedridden, sleepless mother. Her shadow-addicted friend Murk hobbles across the blasted landscape on his wooden leg, molding himself on the image of Jim Morrison he saw on an ancient Doors record. Bale, a former Domer thrown in to exile, joins with them, and together they search for a possible mythological cure to the shadow sickness--but they must do so, it is said, before the return of Halley's Comet, which is only days away"--