Wise Blood

This book haunted me for days after I finished reading it. I felt like someone I loved had died. Few works of art have stuck with me the way O’Connnor’s book did. Its main characters—Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery—are the epitome of outsiders. I grew up in a religious family in Kentucky, so I can understand Motes’ struggle with faith. The way that Motes and Emery are so severely separated from the rest of humanity is affecting them.

The book caused me to passionately take their side, rooting for them and their cause, sharing in their anger towards the rest… show more.

William Faulkner might have been the father of Southern Gothic, but Flannery O’Connor was the master. This is one of those books that makes you thankful for genius. Because everything about this book is genius. The story is about a young man named Hazel Motes who struggles to avoid his relentless fate. O’Connor’s writing is filled with religious extremism, grotesqueness, and mental illness—all the things that make America great. If I could have written a single book—this would be it.  

Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor makes me cackle and cringe at the same time. Her debut novel Wise Blood is rich with dark satire and cutting humor, disappointment with the modern world, and profound pity for it. After his release from the military, Hazel Motes turns atheist street preacher in an absurd and ultimately horrifying struggle with his own beliefs. To promote his “Church Without Christ,” a mummified dwarf is swiped by Enoch Emery, a troubled young man who impersonates movie star gorilla “Gonga” so that someone might shake his hand. 

Arguably one of the best writers who ever lived, O’Connor’s voice was totally original, her richly atmospheric stories set in the American deep south. She died at thirty-nine but left a body of work that makes her immortal. Of the writers I read over and over, she tops the list. If you don’t know her work, Wise Blood is an excellent introduction. The cast of characters includes a bitter returning WW2 vet, Hazel Motes, who starts his own non-religion, a blind preacher who is not blind at all and who hoodwinks the rubes with his teen daughter as his partner-in-crime,… show more.