Stacy Horn's 6 favorite works that explore the spectrum of evil
The author recommends works by Kazuo Ishiguro, Anthony Doerr, and more

When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.
Stacy Horn's forthcoming book, "The Killing Fields of East New York," reveals how a 1970s white-collar crime spree transformed a Brooklyn neighborhood into the city's deadliest. Below, Horn recommends books that reset a reader's understanding of evil and complicity.
'The Glass Hotel' by Emily St. John Mandel (2020)
How do people like Bernie Madoff live with themselves after knowingly destroying many lives? This novel, a subtle masterpiece with a Ponzi scheme at its center, shows evil's complexity and how we all become to some extent corrupted. Everyone is trapped by forces within and without. We transcend those forces to the degree we're able to, or, in many cases, not at all. Buy it here.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Another masterpiece, this novel depicts the various attitudes ordinary people assume in order to go about their lives in the face of unspeakable injustice. Ishiguro's characters are also trapped at different points on a spectrum of evil, some directly participating in a ghastly cloning operation, others discovering it to be horrifying, but moving on. Buy it here.
'All the Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr (2014)
Doerr's World War II novel somehow manages to be enchanting and hopeful while exploring the moral ambiguities we encounter along the bell curve of evil. A captivating array of answers to impossible questions. Buy it here.
'Shot in the Heart' by Mikal Gilmore (1994)
Detectives who investigate unsolved homicides, I have learned, do not always hate the murderers they capture. Gilmore's story of his family, and of his brother who was executed for murder, is a heartbreaking account of the origins of evil and how hate is sometimes not the most enlightened or productive response. Buy it here.
'The Chickenshit Club' by Jesse Eisinger (2017)
How do the "good guys" live with themselves when they repeatedly let unrepentant criminals go, enabling them to ruin more lives? This book explains why we don't prosecute financial criminals. Learning of the gradual "boiling frog" enfeebling of the Justice Department is painful. Buy it here.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
'Poverty, by America' by Matthew Desmond (2023)
Poverty in America persists, Desmond illustrates, because the rest of us benefit when our country does "so much more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty." We all fall somewhere on the bell curve of evil, and the fact that we don't take this seriously is perhaps the greatest evil. We should do more. Buy it here.
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
-
The delightful, smutty world of Jilly Cooper
In the Spotlight Millions mourn the ‘Mrs Kipling of sex’
-
Lee Miller at the Tate: a ‘sexy yet devastating’ show
The Week Recommends The ‘revelatory’ exhibition tells the photographer’s story ‘through her own impeccable eye’
-
6 eye-catching rounded homes
Feature Featuring a central spiral staircase in Michigan and a Balinese-style estate with ocean views in Hawaii
-
A House of Dynamite: a ‘nail-biting’ nuclear-strike thriller
The Week Recommends ‘Virtuoso talent’ Kathryn Bigelow directs a ‘fast-paced’ and ‘tense’ ‘symphony of dread’
-
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: a ‘haunting’ history of modern Afghanistan
The Week Recommends Lyse Doucet’s sensitively written work traces over 50 years of Kabul’s ‘Inter-Con’ hotel
-
The Smashing Machine: Dwayne Johnson is ‘magnetic’ in gritty biopic
The Week Recommends The wrestler-turned-Hollywood-actor takes on the role of troubled UFC champion Mark Kerr
-
Shadow Ticket: Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in over a decade
The Week Recommends Zany whodunnit about a private eye in 1930s Milwaukee could be the 88-year-old author’s ‘last hurrah’
-
Southern barbecue: This year’s top three
Feature A weekend-only restaurant, a 90-year-old pitmaster, and more