The Viper’s Tangle, a novel by Francois Mauriac, was a favorite of Flannery O’Connor’s, which is why I wanted to read it. My hope that the novel would clarify O’Connor’s religious perspective and way of thinking was fulfilled. (Spoilers follow.)…
Category: Book Reviews
The Habit of Being – The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, Selected and Edited by Sally Fitzgerald. Flannery O’Connor was a fascinating, complex woman. She wrote some of the best fiction ever produced by an American, and couldn’t spell worth a…
Book Review: The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor When I decided to read Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, I went in cold, as I often do when exploring unpopular culture. On the one hand I was eager to read O’Connor, because…
Cold Hand in Mine is a collection of eight strange stories (as the author liked to describe them) by Robert Aickman (1914-1981), first published in 1975. It is the fourth collection reviewed here, and in many ways, the best. The…
I should have known this volume of Ambrose Bierce’s ghost and horror stories would be a clunker when E. F. Bleiler, in his introduction, almost apologized for the up-and-down quality of the stories — as well as for Bierce’s famously…