A Good Man Is Hard to Find

For some readers the earliest stories in the collection are simply too dark, one summing up the opening run as “Horrible horrible horrible, particularly the first two.” The violence in the title story lands as senseless to a chunk of readers, who come away asking what the point of the ending was rather than feeling it was earned. O'Connor's Catholic framework of grace and sin goes over some readers' heads entirely; one admits “Flannery O'Connor is just too damn religious sometimes, for my taste.” More than one reviewer flags the book's period-accurate use of a racial slur by Southern characters as jarring for modern readers and a real barrier to recommending it without a warning. The misanthropic worldview wears across nearly every story, with no character offered as fully sympathetic, and one reader is blunt about the toll: “I was pretty relieved to finish the book, to tell the truth.”