Reviewed by Brad Bevers

Wise Blood is brutally honest, raw with emotion and energy, and hard for many people to read.  The author, Flannery O'Connor, has a rare ability to convey the human nature in a terrifyingly honest way.  Reading one of her stories is like peering into a dark mirror and seeing the horrible things about the fallen state of the world that still reside within one's own being.

Each of the thirty-one short stories and two novels written by Flannery O'Connor hinge upon guilt, grace, and God.  Wise Blood focuses on the young preacher Hazel Motes as he desperately seeks to avoid Christ at any cost.  Having been raised to believe that God is little more than a set of strict rules and a guilty conscience, he wholly rejects Christianity.  Motes' unbelief is evident in the conversation he has on a train, insisting that he would not believe in Christ "even if He did exist. " Motes' next thought sums up the direction of the novel beautifully . . .

"There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin."

Motes goes on to interact with colorful characters whose own sin is soon exposed, and he continues to draw deeper within himself.  When he is starting his own church, The Church of God Without Christ, a prophetic call is issued for current believers.  Written almost 60 years ago, this novel has an astonishing, heartbreaking grasp on that state of the modern church.  Hearing a church advertised as a place where you "don't have to believe nothing you don't understand and approve of," a place where people are encouraged to "sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited," and finally, a place where "you can know that there's nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don't know."  This description of a church where mystery, community, and theology are disdained, this church without Christ, is shocking and, sadly, prophetic.  Many people will not read this book because it is so raw and makes the modern believer uneasy in their own skin, and that is exactly the reason most people should read it.