In Kieth Merrill’s quietly provocative novel, art and belief collide under San Francisco skies.

In the vaulted hush of a nearly empty museum, a man paints blood in shades of alizarin crimson. His brush strokes summon creatures older than myth, locked in ancient struggle. But it isn’t just the Cro-Magnon hunters or the sabertooth’s scream that pulse from the mural. It’s the weight of the question behind the canvas: What do we believe, and why?

The Color of Miracles, the latest work from Academy Award-winning filmmaker and novelist Kieth Merrill, isn’t a story to be rushed. It’s a novel you absorb slowly, almost reverently, like stepping into a gallery where each character is a portrait in conflict, each setting a frame for a larger philosophical composition.

Set in a richly imagined San Francisco, the book orbits around Thomas Hall, a fantasy artist whose vision of the world is built not on dogma or faith but on shadow, light, and form. He’s a man who can render prehistoric life with vivid clarity, yet finds himself at odds when asked to paint something far less tangible: the miracles of Jesus. As he is tasked with two contrasting commissions, one for a science museum exalting Darwin, the other for a children’s hospital grounded in faith, Hall becomes a reluctant pilgrim caught between two evolving worldviews.

Merrill never rushes to resolve these tensions. He lets them simmer, sometimes ache. And in doing so, he crafts a novel that is not merely about science versus religion or imagination versus belief. It’s about the terrifying beauty of unknowing and the art we make to hold it.

The Man Behind the Mural

To understand the calm urgency of The Color of Miracles, it helps to know Kieth Merrill himself. Born and raised in the rural stretches of Farmington, Utah, Merrill is a storyteller with one foot in the mythic West and the other in the machinery of cinema. He’s best known for his Oscar-winning documentary The Great American Cowboy, yet his creative range spans continents, cultures, and mediums. His films have been projected on IMAX domes; his novels unfold like screenplays steeped in poetry.

But Merrill isn’t just a collector of stories. He’s a cultivator of meaning. A lifelong educator and devout family man, he’s built more than narratives. He helped found a private school, nurtures deep community ties, and proudly traces his family tree through eight children, 40 grandchildren, and a growing branch of great-grandchildren. That grounding in legacy, belief, and intergenerational connection pulses beneath every page of his fiction.

The Art of the In-Between

Merrill’s novel doesn’t chase miracles. It invites you to watch them, perhaps miss them, and wonder if you’ve been watching the wrong way. His characters don’t evangelize; they wrestle. Hall, the agnostic painter, isn’t on a quest for faith so much as he is trying not to be swallowed by the demands of others’ convictions. Silas Hawker, the Darwinian museum director, isn’t a villain; he’s a mirror. And Susan Cassidy, the hospital’s PR director who believes in both beauty and belief, never preaches but often prays.

Set amid the fog and fracture of modern San Francisco, the city becomes a backdrop that reflects the novel’s central paradox: how a place can be both a sanctuary and a battleground for ideas. A city of bridges, literal and figurative.

And while there are moments of high drama, a child’s accident, a confrontation at a mural site, a philosophical face-off, what lingers isn’t plot. It’s atmosphere. A tone of quiet provocation, the sense that every character is being asked to draw a line between what they know and what they’re willing to believe.

If The Color of Miracles were a painting, it would not be a finished canvas. It would be a work-in-progress pinned to an artist’s studio wall, sketched in charcoal, waiting for the right light, haunted by the possibility that what matters most might never be fully rendered.

So what color is a miracle?

Merrill never tells you. Instead, he hands you the brush.

And somewhere in the liminal light between crimson and gold, you may find your own answer, tentative, half-formed, but no less real for being unfinished.