Sunday Short: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.

 Flannery O'Connor is probably one of the greatest American short fiction writers of all time and I, kind of embarrassingly, haven't read a whole lot of her stuff (something I hope to rectify this year!). A Good Man is Hard to Find is a longer short about a family traveling out on holiday who come face to face with a serial killer. The protagonist, interestingly, is the grandmother of the family who faces a moral dilemma as she stares (quite literally) down the barrel of a gun. O'Connor masterfully explores the themes of moral character in this short, with a particular focus on religion and prayer which is, for these characters, all style over substance. It's pretty superb as a character study and a social statement.

You can read A Good Man is Hard to Find here.