Empty Cities of the Full Moon

The biotech pandemic of 2032-33, which empties the cities and devastates human population worldwide, is an apocalypse not only destructive but also revelatory. The world's newest technology resurrects the world's oldest religion, a genetically engineered virus precipitating shamanic manias of drumming, dancing, dreaming, and shapeshifting throughout the world. This plague of apparent global madness, however, not only brings down ten thousand years of urban civilization but also creates something new: A postapocalyptic world under the sway of the full moon, a world peopled not only by human Trufolk but also by shapeshifting Werfolk and aquatic Merfolk.
In 2065-66, thirty-three years after the eclipse of urban civilization, travelers from one of the last bastions of the old high-tech world journey through the ghostlands of what was once the eastern seaboard of the United States, searching for answers to what caused the pandemic, and to whether its legacy was the Great Death of superpathogen mortality, or the Great Shift of mass transcendence - where the fraction of the human race that is not killed by the pandemic finds itself transformed in astonishing ways.