Get Haunted: Interrogating the Sublime in O’Connor and Tevis 

To accompany our fall 2025 issue (22.2), we have curated a craft folio on horror, the uncanny, and/or the strange, after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Jen Fawkes’s piece.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Flannery O’Connor. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955. Reprint, Mariner Books Classics, 2019. 288 pp. $19.99 (paper)

The Man Who Fell to Earth. Walter Tevis. Gold Medal Books, 1963. Reprint, Vintage Books, 2022. 240 pp. $16.00 (paper)

Mockingbird. Walter Tevis. Doubleday, 1980. Reprint, Vintage Books, 2022. 320 pp. $16.00 (paper)

Flannery O’Connor would have kicked me in the shins for saying this, but I’m going to say it anyway: She wrote horror stories. “When I see these stories described as horror,” O’Connor said of the reviews of A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), “I am always amused, because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.” As she wrote to a friend in July 1955, “The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.” The horror that reviewers identified in her work wasn’t horror at all, according to O’Connor, but a reflection of her devout faith. Because there’s nothing strange, horrific, or uncanny about Catholicism, or the stories of the Bible, right?

Horror stories, conventionally, are those that shock, scare, or disturb their readers. As a writer whose work has been labeled sick, twisted, bizarre, terrifying, heavy, uncanny, and just plain weird, I, like many thinkers before me, see such work as being rooted in the sublime. Edmund Burke, in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”(1757), suggests the conjoined nature of terror and delight. Natural objects that overwhelm not with beauty but with darkness and/​or ambiguity provoke a “delightful horror”—the sublime. In his 1790 “Critique of Judgement,” Immanuel Kant builds on Burke’s ideas, asserting that the sublime exists not in nature but in our subjective responses to it, locating the sublime in human consciousness. And in the nineteenth-century tales of Edgar Allen Poe, “the sublime . . . is the uncanny experience of the self-within-the-self,” one that transcends reason, arriving at “a void . . . accessible through a perversity that leads to dissolution,” as J. Alexandra McGhee puts it in an article in The Edgar Allan Poe Review.

In A Good Man is Hard to Find’s title story, a prattling, hypocritical grandmother takes a road trip with her son’s family. She repeatedly invokes an escaped convict and murderer known as the Misfit, and by story’s end, her family falls into his grasp. As his henchmen callously murder the family, including an infant, the grandmother flatters the Misfit, trying desperately to talk her way out of death, which has haunted the story’s every page. “I just know you’re a good man,” she tells him repeatedly. “You’re not a bit common!” But when she touches his shoulder and declares him one of her children, the Misfit shoots her dead, and the grandmother ends up “in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.” It isn’t difficult to imagine that these events shocked readers in 1955, but it’s the shift from the grandmother’s viewpoint to that of her own murderer at story’s end that conjures Poe’s “void”—a part of ourselves we cannot name, control, or understand—and forces the reader to participate in O’Connor’s “delightful horror.”

Those of us who make art often have a near pathological need for control, but art-making also demands of every practitioner an openness to mystery, to chaos, to the unknown. A willingness to take our hands off the wheel and allow another force—angel or devil—to steer our vehicle. We might conceive of this as a haunting, or perhaps a possession. It was Flannery O’Connor’s talent for allowing the dreadfully pleasurable—that which hides beneath our beds and lurks outside our shower curtains—to inhabit her that made her such an effective, if disbelieving, master of the horrific, or more accurately, of the sublime. A talent that, according to O’Connor, was instinctive rather than intellectual.

Writing creatively, regardless of genre, requires an ability to oscillate, on a near constant basis, between intellect and instinct. Though I’ve been writing for two decades, I did not realize this until quite recently. For years, I would have erroneously argued that my fiction is a near exclusive product of my mind. I’ve long been aware of the mind’s ability to hoodwink the body: convince the body that it’s ill when healthy or pregnant when barren, that childbirth didn’t hurt after all, that the sorrow weighing it down can only be alleviated by death. But for years, I failed to imagine that the body—in the form of instinct, or unlearned behavior—is doing the very same to the mind.

Let’s turn to Walter Tevis, American author and contemporary of Flannery O’Connor. Though best known, still, for The Hustler (1959), a realist novel (and subsequent major motion picture) that probes the psychological depths of its characters, Tevis also wrote science fiction, another genre rooted in the sublime. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963), his second novel, is the story of an alien who travels to earth in search of water for his desiccating planet. His race, the Antheans, have moved far beyond us intellectually, so after his ship crash-lands in Kentucky, the alien, masquerading as a man named Thomas Jerome Newton, patents a variety of technological processes that make him wealthy. He then uses his resources to begin building a ship capable of returning to his home. Tevis’s third novel, Mockingbird (1980), is also set on earth, but in the twenty-fifth century, a context in which humans—illiterate and unable to fend for themselves—have given over control of their lives to artificial intelligence. Robots, designed and built before people forgot how, run the planet. Robert Spofforth, the most advanced extant robot, a “Make Nine,” wants desperately to be human, and as he cannot, he longs to die. Both stories shock and disturb, yes, but far more powerful is Tevis’s conjuring of characters—spaceman and robot—with whom his readers cannot help but identify. In fully inhabiting beings who are us-but-not-us, we experience the “uncanny . . . self-within-the-self,” and arrive at the limits of the void, where we stand shivering with awe, wonder, and delight.

In both Mockingbird and The Man Who Fell to Earth, the world Walter Tevis builds is ours. By revealing it through the eyes of a space alien and a robot, however, he presents familiar objects, situations, and events in strange, new ways—a technique the Russian Formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky calls defamiliarization: fresh, unexpected similes and metaphors; disorienting syntax and grammar; surprising combinations of traits in characters; non-human viewpoints. In Tevis’s novels, not to mention the fictions of Flannery O’Connor, defamiliarization is at work, yes, but at work simultaneously is its antithesis, a process we might call refamiliarization, the presentation of strange objects, events, or situations in commonplace, ordinary ways.

When The Man Who Fell to Earth opens, Thomas Jerome Newton has been watching humans from afar for decades in preparation for his journey to earth. Though not a man, the Anthean is both “man-like” and “susceptible to love, to fear, to intense physical pain and to self-pity.” In spite of our cruelty and ignorance, in spite of the risks he’s taken and sacrifices he’s made for the people of Anthea, in spite of his fear of our “monstrous, beautiful, terrifying planet,” Newton is seduced by us and our World: “Oh yes, I love you, certainly . . . After all, you’re my field of research, you humans. I’ve studied you all my life.” Thomas Jerome Newton—at once frightened of and delighted by an “inferior” species within which, to his astonishment, he recognizes himself—ends up abandoning his lofty mission and turning to drink. Tevis’s spaceman becomes our shadow self as well as the apotheosis of the sublime.

In the case of Mockingbird’s Robert Spofforth, the robot is overcome, from the moment he first draws breath, by unrelenting emotion. His body, grown from living tissue, is strong, unfailing, un-aging, untiring. His brain, however, is a detailed copy—every pathway and pattern—of a long-dead, brilliant, and melancholy engineer’s. Though his makers attempted to erase the engineer’s personality, Spofforth contains “fragments of old dreams, yearnings, anxieties,” as it was impossible to delete these “without damaging other functions.” As a result, Spofforth falls irrevocably in love with a woman who rejects him early in his endless life. From then on, the Make Nine longs to kill himself, an act his creators programmed out of possibility.

A brilliant alien who descends into alcoholism and despair. An indestructible robot so overcome by emotion that he wants, more than anything, to die. A hardened killer so horrified by an old woman’s compassion, and by her touch, that he springs back “as if a snake had bitten him” and shoots her “three times through the chest.” By enabling us to identify with robots, space aliens, and murderers, both Flannery O’Connor and Walter Tevis take us by the hand and lead us beyond nature, beyond thought, beyond belief, to a landscape where we, too, are all spacemen, and robots, and murderers. Unlike Shklovsky’s defamiliarization—designed to force the reader to slow down, pay attention, engage with a text—the process I’m trying to pin down here isn’t conscious. It does not involve thinking; it is, instead, reactionary. Automatic. Instinctual.

When confronted with the vast ambiguities of nature, our earliest forebears turned to the fantastic to explain external enigmas (crop failure, weather, pestilence, animal behavior), and they depended, for survival, on things like terror, rage, jealousy, panic, lust, gluttony, and greed. Later recast as sins, these automatic responses helped humans endure. Once we learned to build walls—physical, mental, theoretical—sturdy enough to keep nature at bay, and our survival became a forgone conclusion, we turned away from the ambiguities outside us and toward our own mysterious interiors. And like the robot Spofforth and those traces of the melancholy engineer his makers are unable to expunge from him, we seem unable to banish the delightful horror that possesses us each time we catch sight of the “uncanny . . . self-within-the-self.”

For years, I’ve been telling my students that elements of fictional craft such as character, setting, and image—anything subject to description—exist on a spectrum that stretches from experience to imagination. On one end, my flesh-and-blood grandmother June; on the other, the Bride of Frankenstein. One might assume that experience—sitting at June’s rustic, hand-hewn dining table, listening to her chatter about the ailments of her neighbors, nibbling on her signature devil’s food cake, sipping her unsweet tea—resides in the body, while imagination—digging up fresh corpses, dismembering and reassembling them, stretching the final ghoulish product out on a slab, lifting it during a storm, and allowing lightning to spark it to life—resides in the mind.

But I didn’t know either of my grandmothers: Helen died twenty-eight years before I was born; Beth I met once at age five. The June introduced above is a fiction, and Helen and Beth are far less real, to me, than Mary Shelley and Elsa Lanchester, James Whale and Boris Karloff, Colin Clive and Mae Clarke and all those responsible for dreaming up Victor Frankenstein and his sublime monsters. For imagining them into life.

The human body knows a lot more than many of us are comfortable with, which is exactly as it should be. After all, the deepest parts of us retain traces of desert and glacier, volcano and sea; of tiger and ape, zebra and elephant; of spaceman and robot and murderer. Our urge to approach and excavate the uncanny, to shiver with pleasurable dread, is as automatic, it seems, as our urge to fill our bellies, to run from danger, to seek answers that will never exist. The sublime—profound and ancient, accessible yet unfathomable—haunts us from the moment we’re born, collapsing the distance between experience and imagination, gifting us apprehension of objects, events, and situations we cannot consciously identify. As such, this delightful horror is our constant comrade in creation, and re-creation.

Read more from Issue 22.2.