The King of Lakeside - Rob Clarke

A prairie town is a great place to live if you love beer and hockey and don't mind having a demeaning nickname. Lakeside is that kind of place. It's a typical rural community where everyone knows everyone else's business and people have long memories.

Ross Garrison's life in Lakeside alternates between momentous challenges and long periods of comfortable stagnation. He makes the best of what little the town has to offer for a social life, but he is often forced to navigate around the hostility and racism that simmers in the small isolated community.

He goes through the motions of participating in the adolescent beer-fueled culture but can't crawl out from under a humiliating event from the past. Much of The King of Lakeside revolves around the looming twenty-year high school reunion that will drag Ross back to a terrible night where much of his identity was defined.

The King of Lakeside is a narrative about arrested development and social confinement, but it's also a story of awakening and redemption set in a community rich with the elements, both good and bad, that give color to the small-town experience.