In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Gory Stories: O’Connor and American Horror Jon Lance Bacon A few weeks after the publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor complained that reviewers were describing her narratives as “horror stories” (HB 90). Considering all the morbid images they encountered, the reviewers could hardly be blamed for doing so. As The New Yorker observed, a “macabre air” hangs over the collection (93). A Good Man features scenes of violent death, characters with “a corpse-like composure” (CW 318) and “a skeleton ’s appearance of seeing everything” (CW 167), and eerie settings like “the graveyard where the Judge lay grinning under his desecrated monument” (CW 315). What’s more, A Good Man typifies O’Connor’s work in general: images of the macabre can be found throughout her fiction, from Wise Blood to “Judgment Day.” O’Connor insisted that she wrote “Christian realism,” as opposed to “horror stories,” but the truth is, she made extensive, strategic use of motifs from the horror genre. Some of these go back to Edgar Allan Poe, who had, she confessed, influenced her more than any other writer. This influence, which she said she “would rather not think about” (HB 98–99), is most evident in Wise Blood. Mrs. Flood refers to “The Black Cat,” for instance, when she chastises Hazel for behaving like someone in “one of them gory stories,” doing something anachronistic like “walling up cats” (CW 127). Elsewhere in the novel, O’Connor employs the motif of premature burial to which Poe returned obsessively. On the train to Taulkinham, Hazel dreams that his upper berth is a coffin—his mother’s cof- fin—and its lid is closing down on him (CW 14). Later, in his car, he dreams that “he was not dead but only buried” (CW 91). Hollywood, as well as Poe, provided O’Connor with classic horror motifs. Both her novels, for example, allude to iconic figures from horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. The figure of the vampire makes a brief yet prominent appearance in The Violent Bear It Away, in the guise of the sexual predator who picks up Tarwater: after molesting the boy, the man looks “as if he had refreshed himself on blood” (CW 472). In Wise Blood, Hazel dreams that his mother is Jon Lance Bacon 90 a vampire, flying out of her coffin “like a huge bat” (CW 14). With its frequent references to picture shows, Wise Blood is especially rich in horror movie icons. “The Eye,” the villain of the B-movie that frightens Enoch Emery (CW 79), recalls the figure of the mad scientist in films such as 1940’s Dr. Cyclops.1 Gonga, “Giant Jungle Monarch” (CW 100), recalls King Kong. There’s even a mummy, of sorts—the “new jesus,” preserved by some mysterious Middle Eastern process. Like the girl in “The Comforts of Home” who lets out “a loud tormentedsounding laugh in imitation of a movie monster” (CW 587), O’Connor was clearly familiar with the conventions of Hollywood horror. More surprisingly, her narratives share a striking number of elements with a new horror medium, which came into being just as she was starting her literary career. This medium was the horror comic—a publishing sensation, a flashpoint of nationwide controversy , and, as David Hajdu maintains, a crucial factor in the evolution of postwar popular culture.2 Introduced by comic book publishers in the late 1940s, horror titles exploded in popularity after 1950, when EC (short for Entertaining Comics) launched Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear.3 Spurred by their success, the industry would produce about 150 horror titles by 1952—nearly 30 percent of all comics being published, at a time when average monthly circulation was approaching 70 million copies (Benton 51, 159). As David J. Skal points out, horror comics had a larger audience than Reader’s Digest or The Saturday Evening Post (230). If we could examine the comic books that June Star and John Wesley are reading on their fatal car ride in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (CW 139), we would surely see some horror titles. By 1953, the year “A Good Man” was first published, the horror craze was near its peak. In many of their stories, comic books recycled traditional horror motifs. There were vampires, mad scientists, apes run amok, and mummies. There were storylines adapted, or stolen, from Poe. The...

Share