A review by tomhill
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

5.0

The title story is truly great; darkly comic and bleak and disturbing and full of deeper meaning. Most of the other stories in the collection are nearly as good. Flannery O'Connor is just great, her stories are concerned with hubris, hopelessness, evil, salvation. The gothic, the macabre. Examining racism was also important to her. I would say it is impossible to separate O'Connor's Catholic faith from her writing, although Catholicism specifically is often not even referenced in these stories. What is fascinating is that Flannery O'Connor's writing is bleaker and darker than you might imagine given this fact. All the heaviness and suffering you might associate with Catholicism is here, without any of the hope you might also expect. She was deliciously cynical, and I love it.