When the lights go out, the real darkness has just begun. The sun did it in a heartbeat: one catastrophic Coronal Mass Ejection exceeding the 1859 Carrington Event, and everything that kept the modern world alive-power, modern vehicles, communications, supply chains-is gone. The Mackenzie family of Hardin Creek, Kentucky, is scattered across a dying America: one sister fighting to keep her diabetic youngest sibling alive, another stranded two thousand miles away in Los Angeles, and their brother locked on death row for a murder he didn't commit. With temperatures soaring and desperate strangers turning violent beneath a sky blazing with ghostly Northern Lights, Burgundy Mackenzie will do whatever it takes to hold her family together. But help comes from an unexpected source-Frost Hellebuyck, a rebellious survivalist who plays by no one's rules but his own. In the old world, she never would have trusted him. But the old world is gone. Auburn is racing home, Cormac is fighting to stay alive long enough to prove his innocence, and the darkness gathering over Hardin Creek isn't the kind you can fight with a gun. When civilization collapses, everyone is one desperate choice away from becoming something unrecognizable-and not everyone is going to make it.