The stories are alike in that are part of the American Southern genre of the grotesque, they deal in secrets and hypocrisy, and a character everyone looks down on, Billy in the Welty story and Manley in O'Connor, shows himself to be smarter than the others.

Each story has a character or characters that is overtly physically grotesque or "other." In "Good Country People," it is Hulga, who is not only unattractive according to the beauty norms of her time, but has a false leg. She cherishes the leg as a part of her identity but it also becomes a symbol of how remains willfully blind to her own flaws:

She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away.

In "Petrified Man," the overt grotesques are the exhibits in the freak show, such as the Petrified Man, who turns out to have been a rapist, and the pygmies:

They’ve got these pygmies down there, too ... You know, the teeniniest men in the universe? Well, honey, they can just rest back on their little bohunkus an’ roll around an’ you can’t hardly tell if they’re sittin’ or standin’. ... Just suppose it was your husband!

But it is not only the physically "other" characters who are grotesque in these stories, which Leota points out in the quote above when she links the pygmies to their own husbands. Further, in "Petrified Man," Leota, Mrs. Fletcher, and Mrs. Pike are grotesque in their gossip, money lust, and shallow values. Likewise, Mrs. Freeman in "Good Country People" is grotesque in her snobbery and blind social stereotyping while Manley is grotesque in his vindictive meanness and hypocrisy.

In both stories, characters deal in secrets. For example, Manley is hardly the good-fearing Christian yokel he pretends to be. His "Bible" holds a whiskey flask, and he steals Hulga's false leg as a trophy. In "Petrified Man," Mrs. Fletcher is angry that news of her pregnancy may come out, because she is contemplating an abortion. She wants it to be a secret, and she wants revenge on whoever found out, saying:

“All I know is, whoever it is’ll be sorry some day. Why, I just barely knew it myself!" cried Mrs. Fletcher. "Just let her wait!"

Both Mrs. Fletcher and Leota are grotesque in being jealous and angry that Mrs. Pike got the reward money for turning in Mr. Petrie, the rapist. They take it out on her three-year old child, Billy, Mrs. Fletcher holding him on her lap while Leota spanks him with a hairbrush. But he gets the last word, rubbing salt in the wound of their poverty by saying:

If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

Hulga is grotesque in her delusion of being jaded, sophisticated, and superior to Manley, saying:

I don't have illusions. I'm one of those people who see through to nothing

Of course, she doesn't see through to Manley until it's too late. And Manley gets back at her just as Billy did his enemies. He says to her:

I'm as good as you any day in the week.

He proves it by outsmarting her.