The book centers around a group of 20-somethings in modern-day New York City, though the story quickly expands to other parts of America and the world.

[1] The story opens up outside of a nightclub, where Sadie (who was shot in the head sometime prior, leading her to have mental delusions of invulnerability) beats up a bouncer and later a gang member.

When they refuse, he calls the Pinkertons, a group of thugs working to find Sadie for her father, who quickly advance on the nightclub.

Danny abandons work for the concert and finds Kenny, who says Sadie left him after the pair arrived for cooler attendees.

At the concert, the Pinkertons arrive for Sadie, a self-absorbed, verbally abusive woman, who escapes with and warms to Danny after he steals alcohol for her and the two go carousing.

When he gets home, Danny finds Kenny's severed head in the fridge, and his mom and brother dead, a message from the Pinkertons.

Back to the Nightclub in the present, the group flee the Pinkertons just as the police raid the building, while Donnie is having an overdose.

The Pinkertons kill the gang members, but Sadie steals a garbage truck and they make their escape.

He castrates Danny and rapes Big C, but then is attacked by Donnie and Puss Bag, who stabs him in the eye, and he jumps out a window.

In an odd flashback, Sadie is on Mars, where the Spider race is planning to use her to lay thousands of eggs and amass an army to conquer the earth.

Back in "the real world", Danny reveals (to the reader) that he created the Duoshade identity to try to manipulate Sadie and bring her out of the coma.

He is then killed by Sadie, and events show Danny at a home for the mentally disturbed and interviewing a psychiatrist.

Six months later, "Johnny" and Loreli are together, and he is a musical hit along with his best friend, Kenny (engaged to Joannie), suddenly resurrected.

He begins to try to leave Browning along with Loreli, but is constantly thwarted until he confronts some of the local enforcement, who shoot her.

There, Ronald (Danny's former boss at the Brown Bag) and Joanie (his friend) live with their diabetic mother.

Joanie then loses her newfound privileges when she tells her family that she lied and said that she was the missing Brown Bag daughter, Loreli, who has returned.

Angered by many events caused by Brown Bag appearing, Ron spits in Loreli's sandwich, and to pay him back she has the Bag open a cheap sandwich shop that closes his and she removes Joanie's mother from a kidney waiting list, which causes her to die.

Danny tells Loreli he realized some things, and that many of the people they know in Browning are actually his "real life" friends, Runco, Annie, and Donnie.

Danny then wakes up in bed with a spider beneath his head, and proceeds to put on clown makeup, back in Sadie's home.