"The Heart of the Monster," is a protest of the plan by oil corporations and politicians to turn the Northwest's and Northern Rockies' rivers, roads and wilderness into a tentacle of the largest and most destructive petroleum project in history: the Alberta Tar Sands. Bass's novella, "A Short History of Montana, is a portrait of the backward evolution of a fictitious political figure as Big Oil and Big Energy's concepts of power begin to stew in his head and eat away his heart.