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The Prophet from Jupiter by Tony Earley is my current favorite short story. It has everything but the kitchen sink and that might be in there too. It’s got a submerged town at the bottom of a lake, marital infidelity, a dog named shithead, a disabled boy that wears a coat hanger around his neck to ward off the evil spirits, it’s got dead mules rotting in the sun, dams about to burst and catfish as big as Jesus, political ambitions and of course the prophet and his very satisfied wife who is filled with the spirit of the lord when they make love.
I love this story and my only regret is that I didn’t read it years ago. I’ve read it several times in the past year and it has not lost anything in the re-reading. It’s jam-packed with characters, action, emotion and intrigue all wrapped around a man-made lake and the dam-keeper that tends it and the town built up around it.
I read this in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction 1999, but it is in his collection Here We Are in Paradise: Stories as well. Find it, read it.
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