'Freaks and poor people, engaged always in some violent, destructive action,' was how Flannery O'Connor once described the subjects of her fiction. She claimed that her vision of an American South full of distorted bodies and maimed souls was not grotesque but realistic. 'The poor love formality, I believe, even better than the wealthy,' she wrote, 'but their manners and forms are always being interrupted by necessity. The mystery of existence is always showing through the texture of their ordinary lives, and I'm afraid that this makes them irresistible to the novelist.' Wells Tower demonstrates a similar affinity in his collection of short stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

LRB 9 July 2009 | PDF Download