Bear Creek

The town of Bear Creek in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is best described as a cross between The Little House on the Prairie's Walnut Grove and Garrison Keilor’s Lake Woebegone. The year is 1923 and prohibition is in full swing. The Ladies’ Aid Society from the local Methodist Church is the town’s self-proclaimed moral conscience and vows to close down the Snake Pit Saloon, which they believe is providing men with liquor. (No women are allowed inside, thank you.) They are also obsessed with Polly, Molly, and Dolly, collectively known as the “Ollies.” Since they have no last names or visible means of support, the women assume they are “soiled doves.” The Bear Creek Economics Club, consisting of the more influential men of town, meets every morning at Mel Barker’s Hardware and Feed Store, where they plan strategies to protect their assets, e.g. moonshine and the Ollies, from their meddling wives. In their spare time, they organize MACHO nights (Men Advocating Completely Hedonic Outings) in which they play poker and drink moonshine while hiding from their spouses. In the midst of this rural paradise arrives a quixotic Methodist pastor. The Rev. Rudy Hooper had been apprehensive about his appointment to the Bare Creek Methodist Church, feeling it might have been a vindictive appointment in revenge for Rudy’s disparaging comments concerning the character of the Bishop’s wife. He had expected a run-down parsonage in some God forsaken land filled with tsetse flies and cannibals, not an idyllic community such as Bear Creek. But the Bishop had failed to mention that the previous three pastors were now weaving baskets in downstate sanitariums. Nor did the bishop warn Rudy about the obsessive-compulsive beaver that came with the parsonage. He assumed Rudy would discover this soon enough.

• | Author: Larry Buege
• | Publisher: Gastropod Publishing
• | Publication Date: Mar 14, 2022
• | Number of Pages: 271 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0989247740
• | ISBN-13: 9780989247740