A tabloid reporter finds inspiration in the one kind of story that needs no exaggeration: the incomparable, the incredible, lives of the saints... The reporter's assignment: a documentary series on a mass shooter's victims. His favorite theologian: Nicolas Malebranche, a 17th-century French monk in search of Divine Logic who proposed some very modern ideas. Wickedly funny and supremely erudite, David R. Slavitt's LIVES OF THE SAINTS plumbs the depths of media-soaked, trauma-obsessed, game-show-loving America, bringing one heretical extreme to bear on another. Where is God in your average mall shooting? What's left to believe in once everything's been taken? And why is the office moron always the next to get promoted...?