‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’ by Flannery O’Connor

Another author who doesn’t flinch from being cruel to her characters – in her famous ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ she takes it to a tragic extreme. The tone in ‘A Late Encounter’ is more darkly humorous, and the victim not entirely undeserving. To test this idea you could take this story’s General Sash, the 104-year-old veteran and make him swap places with the old rogue in Elizabeth Taylor’s story and see if you still have the same feelings at the end.

First published in A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955; her complete stories are published by Faber and Faber, 2009