Book Review: Agnes at the End of the World

Agnes at the End of the World. Kelly McWilliams (Little, Brown 978-0316487337, $9.99, pb. 448pp) June 2021. Cover by Tom Bagshaw.

 

Agnes at the End of the World features Agnes, a young woman who has been raised in about the worst cult you can imagine. Most of the adult men (patriarchs) have multiple wives. It’s also a doomsday cult, with the leader—the Prophet—predicting the end of the world, hence the title. They are forbidden from having contact with the Outside, since all Outsiders are evil treacherous people. Agnes begins to doubt their teachings because her little brother Ezekiel has diabetes. She sneaks out to the cemetery once a month at night.

Holding a flashlight and blue picnic cooler, she hurried towards the small collection of headstones that rose from the ground like rotten teeth. The grass was velvet, the moon a white slice.

There, amidst the graves, a nurse gives her a supply of insulin. This nurse has only been kind and compassionate towards her.

The story is mostly from Agnes’ viewpoint, though sometime it’s from the viewpoint of her fifteen-year-old sister Beth. Agnes has been the model of a compliant girl, while Beth is more saucy (for a cult member). When the Prophet declares a revelation that Agnes is to be wife number six for a white-haired patriarch, she hesitates out of care for Ezekiel. The patriarch is sure the Prophet will get another revelation that he should marry Beth instead. Agnes has the stunning realization that the cult has been run on lies.

When Agnes finally escapes to the outside world, she finds a plague has ravished much of the world’s population. The story’s copyright is 2020, so McWilliams must have written it without being influenced by the COVID controversies and shutdowns. This pandemic is a nasty one—both animals and humans develop hard red carapaces, with bristles that can infect others. After a while, they gather into Nests—javelinas (feral pigs) together, crows together, humans together, etc. They are grotesquely intertwined with each other but still alive, though showing no intelligence.

Nothing is easy for Agnes, as she seems to have escaped from a bad world to a worse one, all while having to adjust to the Outside. McWilliams does a fine job with her up-close descriptions of Agnes’ constant dilemmas, having been taught that obedience is all and questioning is sin. When she takes refuge with others in a library, she is astonished that a teenage boy there just wants to play games on his device. Meanwhile she hauls water from a well, cooks, and cleans—not even half as much labor as she is used to. And she refuses to shed her prairie dress for a T-shirt and short pants, since she feels naked in them.

The character of Beth is problematic. She comes off as a bratty teenager who happened to be raised in a cult. And some things about Agnes do not fit. She often uses God’s name in vain while thinking, which does not match her upbringing. She learns to drive in one afternoon and escapes the cult by driving down black asphalt in the dark at eighty miles an hour for miles without crashing! She was only allowed to read the Bible and a few crude books for children. But she easily uses words like “illimitable,” “Gordian knot,” and “crypt keeper.”

Agnes’ most important internal conflict involves what she calls her “prayer space.” At first it seems to be a sense of peace she experiences. But she can use it to sense things and people beyond her sight. Outside the cult, she can sense things miles away. And it is not just an internal sense; at one point she uses it to ward off an infected javelina that charges her. Eventually, the prayer space helps her to sense that God is a fluid that permeates all things. Sometimes God tells her to do things, sometimes she can “use” it. This will be disappointing to readers who were hoping she could tease out the difference between the cult teachings and her core biblical beliefs. Others will find it an interesting science fictional element, somewhat akin to the Force in the Star Wars franchise.

McWilliams is a lyrical writer, going from scenes of twisted beauty to gritty details of survival. Be prepared for several pages at a time dealing with the prayer space as the voice of God. This is an original story, and readers should look at it carefully to see if it is their cup of tea.