First published 2025
Award-winning crime novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan tackles a fundamental question about finding joy in a broken world. He examines three murders from history, beginning with Cain's killing of Abel, the first murder recorded in human history. Klavan studies how artists from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Alfred Hitchcock transformed these dark events into works of beauty and meaning through creative imagination. He argues that making beauty from a world filled with evil, injustice, and suffering represents the central task not only for artists but for anyone seeking to live well. By analyzing how this transformation happens in art, Klavan provides a framework for how readers can achieve similar transformation in their own lives. The book builds on his previous work in The Truth and Beauty, where he explored connections between great poetry and gospel truth. Here he focuses specifically on evil's role in human nature while maintaining that hope and clear-eyed realism can coexist. Klavan demonstrates that recognizing the world's darkness need not eliminate faith in redemption's possibility.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, crime, 21st-century
Vibes: dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: dark-themes, literary-analysis
Period: Ancient History, 20th Century, 21st Century
272 pages · Hardcover · Zondervan
Content warnings: death, murder, violence