A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of my college professors once said that when you finish a story by Flannery O'Connor, you feel like you have been yelled at. I know exactly what he means. This is exhausting, heavy fiction, and as you finish most of these stories, your heart is racing and you need to sit and recover for a few minutes before you do anything else.

To be honest, I really didn't like this set of short stories at first. They tend to be morbid, violent, and (at times) simply weird. But after finishing the book, and especially the final story "(The Displaced Person"), I have to admit that O'Connor is a powerful writer whose fiction can shock her readers into seeing the rock-hard reality of right and wrong, the depravity of human nature, and the possibility of grace if we choose to receive it.

In a lot of ways, this is Christian fiction at its best (I should add that I use the term "Christian" somewhat broadly here): Christianity is not tacked into the stories to make them preachy. The stories are Christian because they are subconsciously so--and therefore more powerful (the complete opposite of Christian bookstore fiction).

I think N.D. Wilson explains Flannery O'Connor's fiction best. He said the following recently in an interview with Marvin Olasky:

"Flannery O'Connor's short fiction tells the story of the apostle Paul: Here's this self-righteous, super-smart, clean-cut rich kid who dabbles in murder: He's not throwing rocks but he is holding the coats when Stephen is murdered. Then he gets knocked off his donkey and blinded—but there's always the promise of more coming. In O'Connor this granny gets shot by the outlaw—but the best thing that ever happened to her was getting shot by that outlaw."

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