Fred was the kind of tourist who wore neon-orange safari gear when exploring and tried to pay for street food in Tromsø, Norway’s largest city north of the Arctic Circle, with Chuck E. Cheese tokens.

His current obsession was trolls, and not the online kind. He had read on a sketchy internet forum that Norwegians’ belief in trolls increased exponentially with latitude. Now that he was deep in Northern Norway, Fred was convinced that giant, stone-skinned monsters lurked behind every fiord.

Armed with a plastic night-vision monocular and a jar of pickled herring — which he heard was irresistible troll bait — Fred began his hunt in a tiny coastal village.

His first stop was a local pub to gather intel. He sat next to a weathered fisherman named Jens.

“Where are they?” Fred whispered loudly. “I know they’re here. The latitude doesn’t lie.”

Jens blinked, took a slow sip of his coffee, and sized up the........

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