End Times
By John M. Williams
Sartoris Literary Group, Inc., September 2023
Hardcover: $40.00; Paperback: $24.95; eBook: $9.95
Genre: Fiction
Reviewed by Jon Soko
John Williams has certainly kept busy since retiring in 2015 from LaGrange College where he was a noted professor and advocate for a generation of students, writers, and educators. In addition to currently serving as a well-respected mentor and all-around literary guru at Reinhardt University’s Creative Writing MFA program, much of his attention over the past several years has been devoted to non-fiction works and playwriting. However, his latest novel marks his long-awaited return to the fiction genre.
End Times is a coming-of-age story about an orphan named Jon Karl Odom, who along with his sister, Summer, attempts to navigate the pleasures and perils of growing up in the small town of East Douvale, Georgia. The sweeping narrative begins with Jon Karl’s birth and follows his childhood through adolescence and into young adulthood. A complex character with equal parts intelligence and naivety, he has a knack for somehow overcoming, or at least stoically enduring, tragically unfortunate events and his own inexorable bad decisions.
Lacking traditional mother and father figures, Jon Karl and Summer are forced to figure out life on their own. They are often guided, and at times bailed out, by the wealthy and benevolent Spruill Dawes, an influential local businessman and town benefactor. Owing a debt of gratitude to their grandmother, Dawes agrees to be their de facto guardian and to “look in” on the siblings while taking care of their upbringing (albeit at a distance) so that they are not completely self-raised.
However, Jon Karl’s day-to-day interactions generally involve working odd jobs with Theotis, Dawes’s do-everything straight-talking handyman, or hanging out with Millard, Dawes’s spoiled and rakish son who serves as a sort of ribald Tom Sawyer to Jon Karl’s cynical Huck Finn. At home, Jon Karl helps his younger sister navigate her own path through her teenage years as she is saddled with becoming a woman with not much more counsel than her brother’s hard-learned advice about what not to do. It is when Jon Karl is alone, however, that the reader gets a true sense of the young man’s character through wonderfully written inner dialogue and observations.
After an unfortunate hazing incident involving a camera in the school locker room, Jon Karl reluctantly becomes a notorious sex symbol around town which leads him down several paths of awkward and spectacularly unfulfilling relationships, feeding his ultimate desire to become a recluse. This longing for seclusion leads to him accepting an offer from Millard to become a cannabis grower at an abandoned chicken house on the outskirts of town. A place where “he didn’t think about women except to be glad there wasn’t any there.” A place where he can contemplate life and form his own grassroots philosophies on topics such as love, ethics, and religion.
It sucks being at the top of the food chain—we don’t have any gods to hang out with. Look at them [pet dogs], they just take it for granted. No awe, nothing “sacred,” they don’t “worship,” and they’re not afraid. They just have a heart for these big creatures that give them food and shelter and affection, and don’t have to put on a big show of being grateful, because they just are.
Jon Karl’s peace is inevitably blown asunder when he is busted for growing weed and sentenced to the Glorious Light Turnaround Center, a Baptist-run correction facility owned by Dawes’s self-righteous business rival, Pruet Echols, and operated by the sadistic Barber Balch (equal parts Sweeney Todd and Ed Gein), who has harbored unholy designs on Jon Karl since birth. As circumstances become more horrifying, Jon Karl – the ultimate loner – is forced to realize that he’s simply not capable of handling his problems alone.
In End Times, Williams crafts a true sense of place from a fictional locale using just the right amount of detail to immerse the reader into a complete and authentic world that oozes with the charm and filth, the sincerity and hypocrisy, the virtuous and ruthless, the simple yet complex duplicity commonly found in many small towns – especially those in the South. All of Williams’s characters are well-rounded, original, and uniquely suited to tell this saga of one unlikely family in a blue-collar town. A story filled with off-beat weirdness, tragedies, scandals, beauty, and desperate quests for love and kindness.
Jon Sokol is a writer, forester, traveler, and woodworker. He lives in Northeast Georgia with his wife, Karen. He mostly writes fiction, often drifting toward southern gothic and his fascination with all things peculiar. Jon’s short stories and essays have appeared in the James Dickey Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Southern Literary Review, Well Read Magazine, Gutwrench Journal, Reckon Review, Cowboy Jamboree, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and other journals and anthologies. In 2021, he graduated from Reinhardt University with an MFA in Creative Writing. Jon can be found online at www.jonsokol.com and @JonSokolWriter on Twitter.
