Extract

She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

A family sets out for Florida with a grandmother who hides her cat under a basket in the car, and by the end of the afternoon everyone is dead in a roadside ditch. Flannery O'Connor published this story in 1953, and it remains the most perfectly constructed act of violence in American fiction, a narrative that moves from comic bickering to absolute terror with a logic that feels both impossible and inevitable. The Misfit, who murders them one by one, speaks with a theological seriousness the grandmother cannot match until the final moment, when grace arrives as a gesture she did not know she was capable of making. O'Connor wrote from within a Catholic vision so fierce it looked, to secular eyes, like cruelty. It was, she insisted, mercy.