SOURCE: "Flannery O'Connor: Faith's Stepchild," in The Nation, Vol. 201, No. 7, September 13, 1965, pp. 142-44, 146.

In the following review, Schott discusses O'Connor's Catholicism and asserts that "in Flannery O'Connor's stories evil is man's inevitable fate."

After reading Flannery O'Connor's final stories I ended the night listening to the mathematical music of the baroque. Order had to be restored, the monsters exorcised from the imagination and pressed back into her fiction.

Losers all, her characters act out the Gothic rituals of defeat and destruction in the nightmare American South. And if Miss O'Connor's god was ever aware of them (a problem to return to eventually), he is now obliviously sawing logs in heaven, as Pär Lagerkvist suggested in The Eternal Smile. Let them kill and be killed or grind their teeth in anticipation.

There are nine stories here, all episodes of fatal error and ironic retribution—modern Old Testament scenes...