After reading her complete stories I'm convinced Flannery O' Connor was a great writer; in this book there are stories that stay with you long after you finish them. She gives such a vivid image of an old world in decay (rural South USA of the '50s), full of peculiar and disturbing characters, rednecks and racists, religious and irreverent, entangled in their petty lives and their even pettier grudges. Her influence in contemporary American writers, like Stephen King, is more than obvious.