After receiving his latest rejection from a fiction magazine, aspiring writer Hugh Longford finds The BlockBuster™, a software program advertised to generate mind-blowing plot twists in stories. The program, however, operates with lethal logic: the greater the peril, the better the story. When Hugh feeds scenarios from his actual life into The BlockBuster™, the software suggests criminal acts (including murder) as solutions, and then offers meticulous details how to commit the crimes without being caught. Problems at work and at school, as well as a family crisis boiling over in his girlfriend’s home, force Hugh to decide whether to restrict the violent plot suggestions to his fiction or to actually commit the crimes.