Empty Cities of the Full Moon
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| Author | Howard V. Hendrix |
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| Cover artist | John Jude Palencar |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Tetragrammaton Series |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc. |
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Publication date
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August 7, 2001 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 441 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
| Preceded by | Standing Wave |
Empty Cities of the Full Moon is a science fiction novel by Howard V. Hendrix first published in 2001.
The novel revolves around the near extinction of humanity by an artificial prion originally designed to help the mentally ill but which becomes a shamanistic pandemic of madness, shape-shifting and death. There are 2 plots-lines which each follow the same set of characters before and after this near extinction.
The title of the novel comes from both the correlation between the pandemic's symptoms and the full moon, and that the pandemic effectively emptied the cities.
The novel opens in 1999 with a car accident occurring in parallel universes. In Universe A, the universe in which Hendrix's previous novel Better Angels occurs, the accident is avoided allowing 3 of the major characters in that novel to be born. However, in Universe A Prime the accident does occur and the resulting deaths prevent those characters from being born. The 3 characters are brothers Jiro and Seiji Ansel Yamaguchi, and their cousin John Drinan.
Years later in 2032 the process of Jiro's transcendence, which occurs at the end of Better Angels, results in John being thrown from Universe A to Universe A Prime. Empty Cities of the Full Moon takes place in Universe A Prime after this.
When John is thrown between universes he quickly discovers that there is no record of his existence. The trauma of this event causes John to lose himself in depression. After meeting Mark Fornash, John en-rolls himself in a clinical trial of an experimental artificial prion based cure for mental illness, created by Tomoko Fukuda.
Soon a drumming and dancing mania begins to sweep the globe, causing a large and increasing portion of the population to drop out of their societies. Due to his interest in shamanism Mark Fornash is the first person to recognize the manias as a single phenomenon patterned after shamanistic practises, and to predict it progression from drumming and dancing to visions, shape-shifting, soul-flying and death.
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