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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

When you go on vacation, you probably travel to places to help you feel good, relax, and have fun.

My guest today, well he likes to visit places where great human suffering and tragedy has occurred.

His name is Thomas Cook. He's a writer of crime fiction, but in his latest book, Even Darkness sings.

He takes readers with him on the real family trips he's taken to see humanity's darkest places, including Auschwitz.

They're done in Hiroshima.

We begin our conversation discussing how Thomas and his wife got the idea to visit dark places,

how all dark places are different yet connected, and how darkness has unique power to offer insight and even hope and optimism.

Tom then takes us on a tour of some of the tragic places he's visited and the lessons he learned from them.

We enter conversation discussing the importance of treating dark places with somber reverence and how a personal dark place is created for Tom while he was writing this book.

After the show's over, check out our show notes at a-wim.is-darkness.

Thomas joins me now via clearcast.io.

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All right, Thomas Cook. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

So you wrote a book, Even Darkness sings. It's about your travels.

Now, what's interesting about your travels, a lot of people, they pick themes for the travel, and I've known folks that visited World War Two sites, Civil War sites,

homes of famous authors, places where Hemingway lived, you and your late wife decided to visit dark places.

Now, before we get there, how did you guys define a dark place and what drew you to visiting those types of places?

Well, I think that we had, I knew, especially given the fact that it occurred to me at one point that this would be a book,

was that we had to define dark places in various ways. You couldn't just go from one concentration camp or one battlefield to another.

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