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Meet Bartlett Hughes, a WASP living on the Upper East Side in his renovated brownstone, sipping cool, refreshing vichiyssoise on a sultry August night while the wife and kids are at their summer place in Maine. Bart, as he likes to be known, is an investment banker who oversees "investment management opportunities in his unit." He eats two slices of toast for breakfast every morning, although sometimes he has an English muffin "as a special treat." He and his wife, Meg, speak to each other in sentences studded with exclamation marks, they are best friends with Janet and Bill Fharquar, and utter phrases like "Oh, darn!" when their plans fall apart. As one colleague says admiringly, “Whether he’s winning or losing, Bart Hughes always looks like a winner.”

In other words, you really, really want to see a rat gnaw off his balls.

When Bart and Meg moved into their renovated brownstone they had to kill a lot of mice which left Bart with rodent PTSD, so when nibbling noises start to echo from the walls and things begin to get chewed by phantom teeth he snaps into anti-mouse overdrive. In fact, he goes a bit overboard about the whole thing. He becomes obsessed with mice, and soon reading the book begins to feel like listening to someone go on and on at a party about selling their house. Yes, it's probably taking up all their waking hours, but do they really have to bore you with their endless stories about it?

Bart's dreams are haunted by the mouse's “beady black eyes” its “twitching nose and whiskers”, and at work things aren't much better, “The day turned routine, monotonous, and was plagued by empty periods which were quickly filled with thoughts about the mouse.” Bart sees a Geraldo special about a rat eating a baby's face and the idea that this might be a rat begins to nibble around the edges of his brain.

The "mouse" gnaws through the washing machine tube and causes a flood, then it eats Bart's alarm system, and when the security company guys show up, Bart's worst fears are confirmed.

“Them’s rat droppings!” the security technician screams.

The rat chows down on a 25 pound bag of hamster food and is soon "tha-lumping" all over the house, but then things take a political turn as it becomes confusing about whether Bart is out to exterminate a rat, or the black and brown people that he and his WASP cohorts are rapidly shoving to the edges of Manhattan. Earlier, when talking about moving into his brownstone and how its renovations disrupted the locals, Bart neatly sums up the effects of gentrification:

“Immense colonies of mice, ants, cockroaches, spiders, roving alley cats, marauding termites — these, too, were being uprooted, driven into the streets in droves, seeking alternate sources of food, new lodgings, a fresh start.”

Are those vermin, or people of color? Bart has seen a rat before, both in the Geraldo special which featured it attacking a Hispanic baby, and when his cab rolled to a stop on top of one in midtown, on the corner of Madison and 62nd, to be precise. A crowd of white people clustered around the half-dead, snarling rodent, exclaiming, “Never knew them to come down so far. Don’t they belong up in Harlem?" Are we sure they're talking about rats?

Either way, as Chauncey G. Parker III writes, “Bart knew nothing about rats, other than by reputation.” So of course he goes to the New York Public Library to bone up, but that doesn't get him very far. “Bart knew he was in over his head. He would have to seek out Cletus Washington.”

Cletus is the ultra-blue collar building super around the corner and he is Bart's guide to The Country of Men Who Fight Rats.

“Library?” Clete snorted disdainfully. “Jesus! No book’s gonna teach you how to fight a rat…in real life, I mean.”

When Bart brings up the idea of hiring an exterminator, Cletus snorts disdainfully again.

“Exterminators are for old ladies and guys who either got too much dough or are scared of getting their hands dirty. You one of them?”

The way Cletus tells it, the rats are basically the VietCong:

"See," he says. "You spend 25 - 30% of your time thinking about the rat, but old Mr. Rat, he spends 100% of his time thinking about you...Rats’ll do that, you know…go for the softest body parts first — like the eyes — best way for the rat to get at the brain.”

Full of manly advice from Cletus, Bart baits his traps with raw strips of bacon and waits for the rat to return. Instead it eats his fluffy pillows and then...the fucking rat eats his English Muffins! His “special treat!” “Oh, God!" Bart sobs. "You filthy son of a bitch!”

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The twilight war is over and Bart heads to the basement with the fireplace poker, despite his fears that he might get "jumped" by either this rat or maybe by a non-white mugger, although by this point the two are hopelessly conflated. In an epic battle he discovers that the rat is a female (just like at the end of Aliens!) and he murders its blind, bald litter of ratlings. In retaliation, the She Rat eats his favorite leather chair (the one that belonged to his grandfather!) then, in a queasy-making battle, it drops down on him while he's sleeping naked and goes for his nuts.

No one attacks a rich white man's favorite family heirloom and his testicles in one day and survives. NO ONE!

With a half-gallon bottle of Scotch in one hand and a fireplace poker in the other, Bart and the rat engage in an epic battle that lasts three weeks and destroys most of the house, causes Bart to almost lose his job, and sees him stoned on tranquilizers, rubbing rat droppings into his face, screaming, “COME OUT OF THERE AND FIGHT…OUT IN THE OPEN…YOU LOUSY YELLOW COWARD!”

Drunk and stoned, Bart eventually engages the snarling, hissing Lady Rat in an epic final battle to see who will rule Manhattan. Want to know who won? Check the real estate listings. You'll figure it out.

If anyone was going to write about the trials and tribulations of being a WASP it was probably going to be Chauncey G. Parker III whose author's bio reads like a character study for Bart:

"He was the son in a socially prominent family. His father Chauncey Goodrich Parker Jr. (1898-1953) was a founding partner of the Washington stock brokerage firm, Auchincloss Parker and Redpath — Auchincloss being the name of President John F. Kennedy's stepfather-in-law. He got his job in government service as a Foreign Service Reserve Officer by appealing to an old family friend, Henry Cabot Lodge...As a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Security Council in October 1962. He served as an adviser to Adlai Stevenson...He graduated from St. Paul's School, Harvard University and Harvard Business School. He spent the latter part of his life teaching English to eager young college students at Valencia Community College in Orlando, Florida."

Get that man a rat, stat!

And if you think this novel sounds like it would make a great movie, you're right! It did! Directed by George P. Cosmatos, director of COBRA, Rambo 2, and Tombstone, it's called Of Unknown Origin and it rocks.