Set in 1981 Manhattan, the story follows Grace Ripley, a beautiful executive who counts herself among a secret group of exiled aliens, some morphed to human form to live among us, while others remain in their original guises, waiting to die on the backward planet Earth. Her secretary Marty doesn't know of Grace's origins, nor does Marty's friend Spider O'Toole, a one eyed beauty disenfranchised from society and floating from job to job. Frogner, an alien disguised as a human salesman, discovered Grace's alien identity while trying to make a deal. He tells this to Harry Sloane, head of the Manhattan Grief Clinic, a front for the alien hideaway known as the Corridor, where any manner of extraterrestrial is stuffed into cubicles to live out their useless lives. Sloane desperately wants to find John Taiga, an alien who may have developed a way to leave Earth. Sloane will stop at nothing to find and kill Taiga, including enlisting Grace to go on her own search that leads to New York's seedier recesses and the Corridor's darker secrets. Anxiety kills these beings, while sex can either be a savior that rescues them from morphological breakdown, or it can kill both the alien and the chosen human mate in a life-draining cocoon.
