End Times

De: John M. Williams

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Brother and sister soulmates Jon Karl and Summer Odom, orphaned at an early age and thrust into the human comedy of a small southern town, must survive a variety of predators, especially a sociopathic barber who abducts Jon Karl, forcing Summer to access a surprising inner strength that changes both their lives.

After the death of their mother, Maryrell, Jon Karl and Summer Odom are raised in the town of Douvale by their grandmother, Mildra, whose boss, Spruill Dawes, steps into the role of surrogate father. Jon Karl befriends his son Millard. Jon Karl, sexually precocious, finds himself increasingly humiliated by the ravenousness of Douvale women and yearns for a hermit life while mythologizing the few women he likes to think actually loved him. Summer attracts oddball boys which sends her through a series of ill-suited males and strange jobs.

Complications arise when Balch, a local barber, becomes obsessed with Jon Karl, and even more arise when Jon Karl catches the eye of Vance, a young strip club owner and porn filmmaker. Then, when Jon Karl gets into an ill-advised cannabis-growing scheme, he leaves himself vulnerable to blackmail by Vance. Things get worse when Jon Karl is sentenced to the for-profit Baptist correction center run by Spruill’s hated rival, Pruet Echols, and he finds Balch working there. One day, Summer’s intuition of something wrong sends her, Spruill, and the sheriff into a ghastly scene and a dangerous rescue of Jon Karl. Jon Karl is released to pursue at last the life he longs for, but becomes increasingly seduced by the strange energy of an abandoned roadside house and the oddly familiar portal it seems to offer. Summer has uneasy premonitions about the house, and with the legacy of a young son from one of her earlier boyfriends, and at last a promising relationship with the latest, survives.

Author John M. Williams was named Georgia Author of the Year in 2003 for his novel Lake Moon, and has published a variety of stories, essays, and reviews through the years. His most recent books are Monroeville and the Stage Production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atlanta Pop in the 50s, 60s, and 70s: The Magic of Bill Lowery, co-authored with Andy Lee White, and Village People: Sketches of Auburn.

Williams retired from full-time teaching (LaGrange College) in 2015, and currently works as a mentor in the Reinhardt University Creative Writing MFA program. His and co-author Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s play Hiram: Becoming Hank, about the formative years of singer Hank Williams, enjoyed a successful run at the Monroeville, Alabama courthouse, opposite To Kill a Mockingbird, in April 2021.

Songwriter Ken Clark and Williams have had several local productions of their three rock’n’roll comedies. He has published a variety of stories, essays, and reviews through the years, and has had several stories/novellas included in anthologies, most recently, in July 2020, “In the Beginning was Kitto” in the Australian anthology One Surviving Story. He divides his time between LaGrange, Georgia, and his family’s cabin on Lake Martin in Alabama.