Howard Halliday, a self-described "good-natured zany," is a writer and editor for a sensational tabloid magazine empire whose flagship publication the weekly Midnight Examiner is William Kotzwinkle's conception of the ultimate National Inquirer. He is a man approaching middle age, who, in the company of other ex-literature students and would-be writers, has found a job that permits him to use his gifts with language, his humanities background, and his active imagination. Their situation is not one of diminished expectations, but is instead a sideways movement in their lives. It has opened an entirely new field of experience for people who are a bit too sensitive and reflective to live comfortably amidst the inexplicable chaos of the modern megalopolis. In The Fan Man (1974; see separate entry), the city of New York was a fantastic source of wonder and excitement, the city's dangers and frustrations balanced by its amazing energy, variety, and possibility. At the end of the 1980s, the city has become a vicious carnival of unpredictable characters and bizarre situations. Halliday and his coworkers have learned to appreciate the unpredictable and sometimes wonderful mutations around them, to choose a course of avoidance and deflection rather than active resistance, and to anticipate the most prominent threats. They gather the essence of their experiences into a group of publications (among them are Macho Man, Ladies Own Monthly, Knockers, Teen Idol, and Prophecy) that Kotzwinkle suggests speaks directly to the psyche of the city's inhabitants.

At the core of everything Halliday and the staff write is a latent sexuality aimed at enabling readers to develop fantasies that allow them to momentarily escape from their concerns, frustrations, and limitations. Kotzwinkle knows that this kind of journalism is not constrained by the truth and that nothing he can invent will ever surpass the stories that appear in supermarket tabloids every week. But he has developed a comic context which places these stories somewhere between an appalling self-deception verging on lunacy and awe of the human mind's ability to conceive of so much outlandish, preposterous, and irrational nonsense. The staff writers themselves embody this same contradiction, knowing (with ironic self-amusement) what they are doing and then entering into the spirit of the game anyway. At the heart of this portrayal is a respect for this kind of journalism, an absence of condescension, and a delight in the imaginative talent of those who must satisfy an audience ravenous for the same bizarre material in ever-new forms.