Presented at the 2017 National Conference in Austin, TX.

Why do many Christians fail to see anything redemptive in O’Connor’s violent and grotesque stories? Our aim is to see they are comic in the Christian sense of the word, most especially in “The River,” a story that many people find appalling. We shall see that, if only in the moment of death, her characters are almost always awakened by the One whom they have sought to forget. They discover that the triune God has not forgotten them. He has pursued them down all their alleys of escape, until they are comically caught and redeemed.