Pontius Foeb is the aging author of obscure nonfiction books like Old Von Steuben Had a Farm: The German-American Settlement of the Midwest, and Czech and Sea: Dvorak’s Voyages to America. His day job is with the Minneapolis publisher of obscure trade journals like The Journal of Plasma Beam Annealing and Bar Code Solutions. But Ponty has just been downsized, and he’s desperate. Enough with the obscure. He needs a commercial hit like Bunt Casey, the author of such technothrillers as Go Skyward, Missile.

So Ponty comes up with a horror story: He’ll write a tall tale about a giant rat that terrorized the tiny hamlet of Holey, Minnesota, in the 19th century. He enlists the aid of young Jack Ryback, a patty-flipping colleague at Medieval Burger, who will pose as the author (sixtyish isn’t sexy)—but the bumbling Jack mistakenly sells the manuscript to the agent as nonfiction. Now Jack and Ponty have to convince the residents of Holey to help them in their deception before the media hordes arrive.