The Five Fleas Hotel is the first part of a ruminative, at times comical, six-and-a-half part novel entitled '6 1/2,' which is about the making of a film and about the life and death of both the filmmaker and his father (who is the film’s protagonist). In early 1950s America, Percy Fetter, 24, decides to make a film about a man he doesn’t know — his long lost father. He goes in search of that father and finds him in the Midwestern town of Hog'npain, which was once the center of a thriving pork industry, but is now an economically deprived ghost town. The cause of its decline was a series of miraculous events that occurred in that region a generation earlier. Now Percy sets out to find out all he can about his father's life, even before introducing himself. What he learns from a cache of letters makes up much of the content of this first book in the series. For starters, Percy learns that his father had recently abandoned a wife and daughter in nearby Prairie City, suspending the job he'd had for thirty years. He learns that the father’s reason for coming to Hog'npain had been to find his missing twin, who he comes to suspect is the victim of some secret and hazardous job undertaken for the Air Force at a nearby airbase, hosting the Strategic Air Command. Percy's father has also fallen in love with two local women at the same time, and has become an intolerable nuisance to both civilian and military authorities alike. It seems that the beginning of the Cold War and the town's extraordinary spiritual aura has altered the natural behavior of every inhabitant in the region, including thousands of liberated farm animals.