I had a very eerie sense of deja-vu as I dug into the first few chapters of Wise Blood, and I finally realized that I had read them before, or at least slightly different versions of them, in The Collected Stories of Flannery O'Connor, which I read last summer. Those familiar with her short stories will recognize 'The Train' and 'The Peeler' as the first two chapters of the book. It was really creeping my out until I realized why the chapter were so familiar, and then the book continued to creep me out as I delved into the new material. It is just a creepy book.

It reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath and The Power and the Glory, in that it chronicles the moral lapses of a struggling pseudo-preacher. There is a rival preacher pretending to be blind, and a fifteen-year old homely seductress, and an imbecilic youth who spies on women at the public swimming pool -- in other words, all the elements you'd expect from a Southern novel. It's extremely short and makes for a very quick, satisfying read, but I found it packs less of a punch than O'Connor's short stories, which benefit from the way they can drop the reader into the story and then pluck them out again at will. It demonstrates her incredible, spare prose style and I've found it to be a really great follow-up to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.