In alternating voices, three New Yorkers retell their experience of the blackout, and out of their encounter, Tong Cuong weaves a searing tale of three colliding fates.

It's already a stifling August day in New York, when suddenly everything stops. The city that never sleeps comes to a standstill. As evening approaches, glass towers trap their cool inhabitants, disrupting plans and profit. At street level, the rush to collect the ice and drink rises to a frenzy. In the dark black-rooms of an illicit watering-hole in Brooklyn, a pretty crack whore named Naomi languishes in fever and fear, unable to get medical help. Canal, a wise elderly Chinatown native, watches from his store front, seemingly undisturbed by the panic around him.

The melting pot finally lives up to its name when the three narrators' paths cross. Forced to abandon their preconceptions, they make it together out of not only the darkness around them, but out of the darkness of their own personal hells.