A grandmother manipulates her family into a detour that leads them to the Misfit, an escaped convict who will murder them all. O'Connor's title story is Southern Gothic at its purest: grotesque, violent, and lit by a grace that arrives only through catastrophe. The grandmother's final gesture toward the Misfit has been interpreted a thousand ways. O'Connor, dying of lupus, writing from her mother's farm in Georgia, believed in a God who breaks through precisely when we are most broken. The story makes you feel that breaking.