Much Ado About Corona

Summer 2020. The first lockdown has ended in the small Canadian town of Moosehead. Twenty-four-year-old Vincent McKnight emerges from three months of stay-at-home orders into a surreal new normal of multi-coloured face masks, acrid hand sanitizers, and germaphobic neighbours standing six feet apart.

The new normal becomes even stranger when Vince’s Indigenous grandfather sends him to buy a loaf of bread from the town’s new baker. Stefanie Müller speaks five languages, has beautiful blue eyes… and is a certified conspiracy theorist. She believes the pandemic is a hoax to justify totalitarian “public health” measures.

But when the local cop pulls out his taser, Stefanie’s dystopian premonitions no longer seem so theoretical. And when the restrictions threaten Granddad’s life, Vince finds himself going face-to-mask with the emerging police state—forced to choose whether to obey senseless rules or to follow his pounding heart.

©2022 John C.A. Manley (P)2025 John C.A. Manley