A devout Catholic from the “Bible-belt South”, Flannery O’Conner unveils the mystery of God's grace in everyday life through shocking, often violent, epiphanic moments of salvation upon characters who are spiritually or physically grotesque. This common feature of her fiction accentuates her impressive ability to blend religion and the secular. By infusing her fiction with the regional language and detail of her southern background, her stories reveal God by highlighting his absence from people’s lives. Her stories and novels are set in either Georgia or Tennessee, oftentimes in the backwoods or rural areas. Accordingly, her writing is slowly paced, leisurely uncovering a series of unusual people and more unusual circumstances. Furthermore,…show more content… She even states she “wanted one with three legs or three wings but nothing in that line turned up” (The King of the Birds 4). What O’Conner doesn't mention, yet readers seem to recognize, is her eerie ability to provide the reader with insight into himself through her eye for the abnormal concealed by deformity and grotesquery. Her characters often reflect an image of our own inner selves, which serve as an uncomfortable reminder of the potential for evil in everyone, as well as the inherent need for salvation. For example, in one of O'Connor's best known stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a presumptuous, ignorant grandmother is shocked into spiritual awareness by a murderer, known as The Misfit, who primarily kills her family and then her. Through her encounter with The Misfit, the grandmother learns the difference between what she wants to believe and reality. In turn, The Misfit, tortured by his inability to know for certain if salvation is possible, is unable to accept her compassion, thus committing himself to destruction and, ultimately,