Sometime in the unspecified future, a series of detonations has all but destroyed the world. A handpicked few were given refuge in the Dome, a high-tech bubble designed to withstand environmental disaster. Those left outside were not so fortunate. The intensity of the explosions not only devastated the landscape but changed forever those who survived it, fusing people with animals, with objects, with the earth. The lucky ones can still function. One young man has a slavering dog instead of a leg and has “learned how to walk with a quick, uneven limp.” Another has several birds embedded in his back, their wings moving under his shirt. Some types are common enough to have been given names: the Groupies, drunk and vicious, have been bound into one massive body, while the feral Beasts are half man, half animal. The Dusts are barely human at all, monsters who have bonded to rocks and rubble, and who drag themselves out of the ground like living land mines to devour any creature that strays too close.

Pressia is a beautiful, almond-eyed survivor who lives with her grandfather in a ruined barbershop. The Detonations hit when she was only 6, killing her Japanese mother, and now, besides the crescent scar around her left eye, she has a doll’s head instead of a right hand. In a few days’ time, on her 16th birthday, Pressia will be claimed by the OSR — once the search and rescue organization put together to aid survivors, now a paramilitary force that terrorizes the ravaged city. She will be “untaught to read” and either trained as a killer or, if her deformations are too debilitating, used for target practice. Her grandfather has built her a hiding place in a cabinet in the barbershop through which she can escape when the OSR comes knocking, but escape to where? Though there are rumors of an underground network that helps runaways, no one knows for sure. In the bombed-out dystopia of ­Julianna Baggott’s “Pure” — the first book of a projected trilogy — no one ever comes back.

Meanwhile, life in the Dome has its own privations. The younger inhabitants, known as Pures because of their unblemished bodies, are being subjected to a series of “codings,” devised to enhance their physical capabilities and suppress potentially rebellious behavior. Partridge, however, despite being the son of a primary architect of the Dome, does not take well to reprogramming. Oppressed by the claustrophobic regime, distanced from his cold father and grieving for his dead brother, he comes to believe that his mother, who he has been told is dead, may still be living on the outside. Determined to find her, he plots his escape. Beyond the Dome he meets Pressia, who saves him from marauding Groupies, and they decide to join forces.

The film rights to “Pure” have already been sold, with a “Twilight” producer on board, and it’s not hard to see why. Baggott’s postapocalyptic world is realized to stunning cinematic effect, from the roofless barbershop (where “three combs float in a dust-covered glass tube filled with old cloudy blue water like they’re suspended in time”) to the Meltlands, onetime suburbs where children’s plastic jungle gyms have liquefied into violently colored blobs like “warped sculptures,” and the Deadlands, where the Dusts rise up to attack the living, “bringing with them what seems to be a hem of the earth.” The fused and melded bodies of what the elite in the Dome call the “wretches” are each small chilling works of imaginative art. From the stranger’s hand with its embedded keypad to the OSR operative whose younger brother is bonded to his back from the waist down in a “permanent piggy­back ride,” they speak directly to the technological wizardry of C.G.I. and 3-D.