Hoping for positive publicity, a tobacco company offers $25 million to any American town that quits smoking for 30 days. Amidst a media frenzy, Eagle Rock, Iowa accepts the challenge while the company's PR man tries to sabotage the effort.

Reverend Brooks leads the town in a contest to stop smoking for a month, But some tobacco executives don't want them to win, and try everything they can to make them smoke. If townspeople don't go nuts from wanting a cigarette, or kill each other from irritation and frustration, they will win a huge prize.—Brian W Martz <[email protected]>

Merwin Wren, the longtime PR head at Valiant Tobacco, comes up with an idea in his desire to have company figurehead Hiram C. Grayson be known in the same vein as Alfred Nobel as opposed to the man who sold 13 trillion cancer causing cigarettes (who remembers that Nobel was a munitions manufacturer, he who used only a small fraction of his wealth to hand out a Peace Prize?): give $25 million to any town in America that will give up smoking for thirty days. After the laughter from the company executives subsides in the ridiculousness of the scheme, Wren convinces them that no town can meet the eligibility criteria of one hundred percent of its citizens signing up, and even in the remote possibility that any one does, that not all one hundred percent would be able to go cold turkey for thirty days, meaning that this PR stunt to raise Grayson to immortality would cost them virtually nothing. By the entry deadline, one town to Wren's amazement meets the sign up criteria: Eagle Rock, Iowa. It is a town with a population 4,006 and declining as one business and industry after another is leaving town and with them its citizens in it being a depressed town. Rev. Clayton Brooks was the one who spearheaded the initiative in his own self-motivated goal of raising the town's fortunes so that he will be reassigned to the town and church of his choice, preferably more prosperous ones. He was able to convince everyone in town, using one tactic or another, to sign up, even the large percentage of die hard smokers, the toughest case being Dr. Proctor, the town's surgeon. Beyond everyone needing to go cold turkey for the thirty days, the contest brings up some systemic problems within the community, both as a collective and individually. In the latter category is Rev. Brooks' own failings as a husband to his repressed wife, Natalie. Conversely, as there is the possibility that Eagle Rock may actually win the $25 million, Wren takes it upon himself to ensure that it doesn't happen.—Huggo