I’m  fool for a good story. Years ago when I drove five hours for meetings at Buena Vista University and then five hours back on the same day, I survived the hours in the car by listening to books on tape. As much as I wanted to get out of the car and fall into my own bed at home, if the story was good–and much to my family’s dismay–I would often sit in the driveway or circle the block to hear the end. Yes, I am a fool for a good story.

Good is clearly in the eye of the reader, though. You might enter into a story–much like you board a cruise ship–for sheer escape. Only a few pages in, and you are comfortably stretched out on your deck chair, a cold beverage with complimentary paper umbrella by your side. For the remains of the cruise, you leave the mundane, the local, and the inevitable behind you. When the cruise ends, reluctantly, you return to your life–your real life–but momentarily happier for living in a fictional world with neat and easy resolutions.

Cruise ship stories flourish in airports, waiting rooms, and break rooms. Easy in, easy out. I have bought many of these page-turners in my life and found them good for the times and in the circumstances I read them.

But the good stories, the stories that I return to time after time, are not cruise ship adventures. These stories, like naval destroyers, shove their keels through ice and waves, wholly committed to their routes. They do not invite lounging or escaping, but rather pull their readers–sometimes violently–towards their resolutions. And there is nothing neat or easy about these resolutions.

Southern gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor, writes good stories. O’Connor once received a letter from a reader who complained that one of her stories had left a bad taste in her mouth. To which O’Connor replied, “You weren’t supposed to eat it.” Touche. Still, there is something deeply and personally unnerving about a Flannery O’Connor story. She draws you in and lulls you into empathizing with a character you believe is moral and good, a character you believe is much like you. Until, like the destroyer, she pushes through to the character’s core, which is not moral and not good. She strips you of your pretenses and leaves you humbly begging for mercy. These are good stories. The best stories.

At the end of one of her most widely anthologized stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor ends with a poignant scene in which the Misfit, a criminal and murderer, confronts the Grandmother, a nice Christian lady. The Misfit and his men have come upon the family’s car by the side of the road and have systematically killed the Grandmother’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. Only the Grandmother remains, begging for her life.

O’Connor helps us to see the Grandmother’s weak claim to Christianity and her tenuous faith. Even the Misfit sees through her religious veneer and reminds her that she has nothing to fear if she really believes what she says she does. Moments before he shoots her, the Grandmother finally falls to her knees, reaches out to touch the Misfit, and cries, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” Here, she sees what she has been unable and unwilling to see her entire life: the Misfit, too, is a child of God.

After shooting her, the Misfit turns to his partner in crime, Bobby Lee, and says, She would’ve been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. Now this is a line to end a good story, a line to live by! Wouldn’t we all be good people if there was somebody there to shoot us every minute of our lives? I have carried this line with me for years, using it as a litmus test before committing myself to crucial words and deeds. If a gun was to my head, what would I say? What would I do? 

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is, O’Connor wrote. In the sanctuary of good stories, readers lose themselves to words and find themselves in transformative meaning.

O’Connor understood that the type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose]. There are few writers today who would ever consciously link reality with mystery.  And yet this is precisely what makes O’Connor’s stories good: she looks, unblinkingly, into the face of reality with all of its ugliness, evil, and despair, while holding fast to, and offering up the mystery of grace and goodness.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose]. In the sanctuary of a good O’Connor story, readers will find its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass. This realm will neither transport him to the deck chair or soothe him with neat endings. In truth, this realm will ask a reader for much but will also deliver much in return.

Stories of all kinds have sustained me through my life as a student, teacher, and reader. The  really good stories, however, have surprised me with insights into myself and my world that I could never have imagined. I would be lying if I told you that these surprises were generally pleasant ones; most have rocked me to my very core, revealing darkness and decay.

But when, in the sanctuary of a good story,  I find myself confronted with such “surprises”,  I hold fast to the words of Flannery O’Connor: The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.