Denver writer Harry Maclean is well-versed in evil. The author of four nonfiction works and an Edgar Award winner, he is best known for “In Broad Daylight,” about the 1981 murder of a small-town Missouri bully in front of 45 witnesses. Now, for the first time, he uses his knowledge of the human psyche in a work of fiction. “The Joy of Killing” is as frightening as it is compelling.

The story is about an unnamed college professor who holes up in a deserted house one lonely night to write about his life. He once spent summers in that house and remembers the town pervert and the time when his friend Joseph drowned, when another friend betrayed him. He fantasizes, too, remembering sex with Shelly Duval. The memories, both false and real, are intertwined with a teenage sexual experience, with a girl he meets on a train.

There is something unreal about the man’s presence in the house, as he writes what seems to be a conclusion to his life. “If the story of your life has played out as mine has and you’d care to write the end of it, then you do something like I’m doing,” he says. “You sever yourself from the future, in hopes of finding a final more enlightened present.”

He remembers the past in fragments, the truth revealing itself in disparate images. Events that at first seem benign become frightening as the night passes. At times, the story is surreal. The house is eerie, emitting sounds. He may not be alone, and he locks the door to the room at the top of the house, where he types on a battered typewriter. The narrative jumps back and forth, between the events of the past and the present as the man not only tells his stories but delves into the meaning of them.

Maclean writes in an afterword that he was about to set out on a year’s road trip to write a nonfiction book about bizarre crimes in small towns when a friend suggested he write fiction “from your own peculiar voice.” Maclean started the novel two days later. “I had no goal to finish the book on the trip,” he writes. “But the unstructured nature of it, the lack of routine, proved to be the perfect context for the story to evolve.”

“The Joy of Killing” — the title comes from a Mark Twain quote — is an unnerving work. Maclean writes about the self-serving nature of evil, the thrill of violence, the amorality of humans. The story’s narrator has written a novel about a man who killed his wife for the joy it brought him, and now the professor himself wonders about the pleasure that violence brings, as if it is a part of his nature and he is no more responsible for what he is than a turtle or a typhoon.

This is a disturbing novel and one that is impossible to set aside as it draws the reader toward a startling conclusion. Maclean is a master not only of story, but of words. The writing is too lyrical to categorize the book as just a thriller. “The Joy of Killing” is a noir literary work, a relentless tale about the dark side of the human soul.

NOVEL: THRILLER

The Joy of Killing

by Harry N. Maclean (Counterpoint)