I have a weird problem. I confuse Flannery O' Connor with Carson McCullers. Then sometimes I mix them both up with Shirley Jackson. I wish I knew why I did this. I picked it up thinking it was a book of McCullers short stories. It wasn’t, but it was similar in some ways. Stories of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation. People being truly horrible to each other for reasons even they don’t sometimes understand. Sometimes, if you hang on long enough in these American Gothic bleak tales of forgotten people, sometimes you see the bad folks get what’s coming to them. But not enough, not nearly enough.