“A thrilling apocalyptic tale that rushes from the inside of a prison to a world that feels even more dangerous. The End couldn’t have come at a better time for Gerald Nichols.”
There is something strangely liberating in reading novels about hardship and suffering. The worse a character has it, the more we, as readers, enjoy their struggles. Some argue that the darker the circumstances the more satisfying the victory…and, given the chaos in the world right now, the timing couldn’t be better for John Jantunen’s powerfully grim Savage Gerry.
Published by ECW Press, this 336-page novel is a quintessentially Canadian tale of suffering and sacrifice. There is redemption too—for its title character, if not for the broken world which spawned him. As per the jacket blurb:
Dubbed “Savage Gerry” by the media, Gerald Nichols became a folk hero after he shot the men who’d killed his wife and then fled into the northern wilds with his thirteen-year-old son, Evers. Five years after his capture, he’s serving three consecutive life sentences when the power mysteriously goes out at the prison. The guards flee, leaving the inmates to die, but Gerald’s given a last-minute reprieve by a jailbreak. Released into a mad world populated by murderous bands of biker gangs preying on scattered settlements of survivors, his only hope of ever reuniting with his son is to do what he swore he never would: become “Savage Gerry” all over again.
Jantunen, whose brief bio asserts he “has lived in almost every region of Canada,” writes of hardship and struggle with a sort of visceral, first-hand knowledge seldom seen in this country. Readers can feel that the novel was “greatly informed” by the author’s “experiences trying to come to terms with the opioid crisis” and its “disproportionally harsh toll on […] northern communities.”
Though the premise is deceptively simple (surviving the “End” times is nothing new), the character of Gerald Nichols is complex in the extreme. A misunderstood man—one who often works against his own best interests—Gerry travels through a broken landscape hoping to become whole. Driven by love and whipped by regret, he sets out to find his estranged son and protect the boy by any means necessary. Gerald Nichols may be a killer, a monster, and the kind of man even his fellow convicts try to avoid, but when the world’s burning, there is no one better prepared to stand against Armageddon’s coming madness than someone who’s already lost everything.
Set against the backdrop of post-apocalypse Ontario, this brutally honest novel shines a spotlight on the too-often shadowed underbelly of Canada. Universal truths are revealed in Savage Gerry. There is a parallel between Jantunen’s conflicted titular hero and our too-often divided nation. By focusing on the very real costs of survival—on both a personal and communal level—the novel reveals the price Canadians currently pay to maintain our so-called civilized society.
No author currently writing in Canada pushes bigger ideas than John Jantunen. His is a unique perspective. Abrasive and often shocking, the author’s novels are firmly rooted in hardship and feature the sort of hardscrabble existence most us are happier to never think about.
As real, painful, and shocking as a knife in the belly, Jantunen’s latest work glories in exposing prejudice and inequality. The author never once shies away from the ugly and utterly senseless violence common to society’s downtrodden, including the shocking damage done by addiction and poverty. He catalogues the cancerous consequences of fear, hate, and desperation with an almost sociopathic sickness . There are no shallow, politically correct sympathies in Savage Gerry’s pages. Rather than peddle polite platitudes or cheery “road to Damascus” conversions, Jantunen forces his readers to question their core beliefs and most base assumptions—all the while telling an enthralling end-of-the-world adventure yarn in the vein of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Savage Gerry, the author’s fourth novel with ECW (after 2014’s Cipher, 2016’s A Desolate Splendor, and 2018’s No Quarter) is, on one level, a rip-roaring post-apocalyptic story told with passion and skill. But, for those willing to read a little deeper, there is another, much more disturbing layer to the book, with Jantunen eviscerating the illusions every one of us holds dear. By exposing the sacrifices necessary to prolong the peace—or the pretense of peace—the author weighs civilization’s collective good against Gerald Nichols’ happiness.
Savage Gerry asks three questions: How much can one man fight? What lines will he cross to protect everything that is important to him? And, can a person ever come back from such raw savagery? In doing so, Jantunen merrily exposes the dark and ugly underbelly of “Canada the Good,” imagining just how far modern society can fall when given the smallest push.
Taking on the Sisyphean task of highlighting the hypocrisy of conventional CanLit—with its celebrated “nation-building” and congratulatory affirmations of history’s “upward trend”—Savage Gerry is a blistering middle finger to the establishment’s cherished self-delusions and safe mediocrity.
Apocalyptic in all the right ways, John Jantunen’s novel is devastatingly honest—almost savage. Important “literature” shouldn’t be this fun.
Savage Gerry is available April 2021.
