Spring Comes to Dreary

On the night of the first full moon in April, the citizens of Dreary celebrate the arrival of spring with Badger Day, one of the town’s oldest and most enthusiastically observed traditions.

At the center of the festivities is the ceremonial arrival of the Great Badger, a figure always portrayed by one of Dreary’s resident were-badgers in full animal form. Emerging from the countryside after nightfall, the Great Badger enters the town bearing symbolic offerings: an apple, representing the promise of growth, and a small pail filled with earth, worms, and grubs—tokens of the soil’s renewal and the less visible labors of the season.

The procession is greeted with cheers, lantern light, and general revelry. Children are encouraged to follow in the Badger’s wake, while adults partake in food, drink, and a variety of less easily described entertainments. The atmosphere is celebratory, though not without a certain underlying roughness characteristic of Dreary observances.

The identity of the Great Badger changes from year to year. The role is considered an honor among the town’s were-badgers, and is taken with great seriousness.

In the most recent celebration, the Great Badger was portrayed by Claude Clemhopper, a local carpenter and furniture maker. Clemhopper has lived as a were-badger for nearly forty years, having been bitten during a solitary excursion in the woods north of Dreary Lake.

“I went out looking for Erystys Tower,” he later remarked, “and got bit instead.”

Full record found in The Dreary Archives.

 

Dreary Personages No. 2: Nancee Laithe

 

Southern novelist whose unpublished feminist epic is said to be "unspeakable." Moved north to Dreary in 1924 with her young daughter Poppy, because she found the town to be more "hospitable" than anything in her native Mississippi. Which does not say much for Dreary's hospitality.

As part of the Ice House gang, Poppy has had some hair-raising experiences, but Nancy dismisses them as imaginative nonsense, something that she believes Poppy inherited from her.

Perceived by most as obscene, unreadable, or worse, Nancee’s ponderous novel is said to contain sentences that no one can repeat aloud without choking. On a quarterly basis, she reads passages at the Mortimer Hask Grave Memorial Library to a dwindling audience of masochists, moths and chair creaks. Rumor holds the book is unfinished because she keeps adding new characters and material. In 1945, she led the committee to launch the Dreary Arts Festival.

Full Record found in The Dreary Archives.

Dreary Personages No. 1: The Gray Stinger

 

A Dark blur along the Bog Road generally means one thing: THE GRAY STINGER is on the prowl!

Aspiring Pulp Novelist Stockbridge Groan is a part-time stockboy at Maudlin's Mercantile, part-time clerk at Black Street Books, and part time Want-to-Be Hero, THE GRAY STINGER! He created the character to star in his own pulp-flavored Superhero Fantasy stories, but when the stories failed to sell, he decided to bring his creation to life in the only way that he could: BECOME him.

The Gray Stinger is the perfect Superhero for Dreary, Maine.

He is living the scream.

He has a lair (his upstairs apartment above Maudlin's Mercantile). He has gear. He has multiple costumes. He has a crime-monitoring station. He has a signature vehicle.

And he walks through that door every night and faces Evildoers in the town that he's chosen to "protect."

You don’t have to be good at the dream.

You just have to love it enough to keep going.

Full Record found in The Dreary Archives.