On Not Liking Flannery O'Connor (And More)

What makes dark fiction good (and bad)

Last week, I caused some outrage in Literary Catholic Twitter by mentioning that I’m not a great fan of the much-revered Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. This is not unusual for me. I hardly miss a chance to air my beef with St. Flannery. For some reason, this time things snowballed to the point where before I knew it, I’d created a whole micro-discourse, with angry lit-Caths (and some vicariously angry lit-Prots) coming out of the woodwork from hither and yon to take their whack at me.

What had begun in good fun got rather aggressively weird rather quickly, and I was glad when it finally blew over. Among other things, a few people thought it would be terribly funny to quote at/about me the most famous line from O’Connor’s most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in which a possessive grandmother is brutally murdered along with her entire family after they take a fatal wrong turn on a road trip. The murderer, who is given an entirely unearned mad-prophet-gone-wrong aura, pronounces the unlucky old woman’s supposedly profound epitaph: “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” For the uninitiated, I have not spoiled this story. I have spared you from it.

Someone graciously said he’d host a piece where I organized my anti-Flannery beef into a more considered shape, and one of these days I mean to take him up on it, but first I wanted to put some somewhat less shapeful thoughts down here, and to encompass more writers than just Flannery. By chance, Chris Rufo also recently got himself into hot water by confessing that he’s not a big fan of Cormac McCarthy. After reading the first 100 pages of The Road and Blood Meridian, he gave up on both works, finding the nihilism too overpowering. Evidently, McCarthy’s fanbase is about as thin-skinned as O’Connor’s. I do, however, think both writers were considerably talented, and I don’t dislike everything they wrote. In fact, I would encourage Rufo to give The Road another try, and in this post I’ll talk a little about why, as well as the one O’Connor story I’m really partial to. Along the way, I want to try to articulate some of my philosophy of dark fiction—why not all dark fiction is created equal, what I look for by way of compensation for the darkness, and why it’s not a sign of uncultured something-something not to care for some writers conventionally considered Great.