The Night of Long Knives is a post-apocolyptic novel taking place after a nuclear holocaust. Survivors are left to wander in a wasteland and survive by scavenging and murdering other people. A new culture of survival has arisen based on random killing. Other cultures also emerge that rekindle technology and are hostile to the nomadic murderers of the land. It is a brutal world that moves by one rule, as epitomized by the epigraph that begins chapter one: "Any man who saw you, or even heard your footsteps must be ambushed, stalked and killed, whether needed for food or not. Otherwise, so long as his strength held out, he would be on your trail."