Flannery O'Connor's preoccupation with the spiritual condition of modern man … led her to write fiction of a peculiar cast, but her religious concerns fortified rather than weakened the artistic integrity of her creations. (pp. 9-10)

Her fiction abounds in grotesque situations and many of her most memorable characters are driven, "possessed" individuals. Freaks, fanatics, and psychopaths stalk the unfriendly streets and desolate clay roads of her fictional world, which often appears designed to simulate as nearly as possible a chamber of horrors. Thus can one explain the confused and sometimes hostile reaction of those who, in the early and middle 1950s, saw in Flannery O'Connor a disciple of the nihilistic-deterministic writers spawned by the Depression and the Second World War and the spiritual and cultural stagnation which followed them.

Yet Flannery O'Connor's own estimate of her vocation could not be more seriously religious: "I don't think you should...