I don’t watch horror films or read gritty murder mysteries. My favorite detective stories are Alexander McCall Smith’s decidedly tame tales in his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I simply don’t like the effect that reading or watching graphic depictions of depravity has on my imagination. There’s a reason that Paul enjoins the Philippians to meditate on what is just and pure and lovely (4:8).
But when Christ tells his disciples to be as innocent as doves, he does so only after commanding them to be as wise as serpents (Matt. 10:16). Obeying both of these injunctions requires real discernment. And this is what Andrew Klavan aims to provide in The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness. As an award-winning crime novelist and screenwriter, Klavan knows plenty about art that probes the depths of evil, and in this book, he reflects on how such art might help Christians discern the light of Christ.
Klavan labors to articulate art’s power to guide our lives east of Eden, helping us live in hope of Christ’s ultimate redemption of all suffering and death. Although these efforts are often unsatisfying, he helpfully focuses readers’ attention on essential questions. He knows that Christian artists shouldn’t take their cues from Hallmark. Instead, by boldly facing grotesque evil, they can help us recognize the sin that marks our own lives.
While murder, as Klavan writes, is the ultimate “denial of [another] person’s reality and an offense against the God who holds that reality dear,” all sin similarly blasphemes God’s good creation. And by confronting us with the twisted, rebellious nature of sin at its most extreme, artists can prod us to recognize and repent of the sins we cherish and rationalize. “When an artist uses his imagination to create a true work of art about murder,” Klavan declares, “he is confronting death with art, making creation out of destruction, containing evil within an act of love.”
This is a stirring and faithful vision for art, but for the most part Klavan fails to articulate how we can distinguish between “true” works of art that frame evil within a redemptive vision and false creations that voyeuristically celebrate or excuse evil.
The book follows a loose, associative structure that begins with three murders and some artistic or philosophical responses to them. Then, in three shorter chapters, Klavan reflects on avenues through which he’s glimpsed the love that harmonizes jangling acts of human disobedience into divine concord.
In 1834, Pierre François Lacenaire brutally killed a man and his mother. Afterward, he set France and all of Europe on fire with his insouciant defense and his self-aggrandizing journals, in which he explained, in Klavan’s words, that “his crimes weren’t crimes, they were a rebellion against [a] cruel society.” Fyodor Dostoevsky based the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, on this Parisian, calling him an “enigmatic, frightening, and gripping” man of “boundless vanity.”
But while Dostoevsky sought to understand and expose Lacenaire’s self-justifying logic, others celebrated it. Some, like the 1920s murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, saw such flagrant violations of social mores as justified in the aftermath of the death of God. For Leopold, writes Klavan, “the ultimate proof that you were this Nietzschean ubermensch, … the proof that you were beyond good and evil and immune to error, would be to commit the perfect murder.”
In discussing a 1929 play, Rope, inspired by Leopold and Loeb’s crime, Klavan warns that even those who shudder at grotesque murder can justify their own lawless acts as rebellion “against the corruption and hypocrisy of society.” His primary target seems to be progressive liberal elites, the “anxious, educated urbanites” who relish Woody Allen films because they “dramatiz[e] the cultural elite’s attempt to free itself from the logical conclusion of a moral order: the existence of a God who holds the lives of others dear.”
Fair enough, and Klavan singles out hypocrisies likely prevalent among his friends and collaborators in Hollywood: “the activist who dismisses the humanity of the unborn” and “the academic who justifies a terrorist’s slaughter.” Yet he overlooks plenty of examples that might hit closer to home among fans of his show on The Daily Wire—a president who praises those who assault police officers and breach the Capitol grounds to protest election results, for instance. As Klavan himself notes earlier, “the terrible gift of Christianity—if it is Christianity true to Christ—is that you cannot accommodate your own sin.”
In the second chapter, Klavan turns his focus to Ed Gein’s 1950s crime spree in a small Wisconsin town. Gein’s perverted rituals with his victims’ corpses, all performed under the noses of his unsuspecting neighbors, inspired crime novelist Robert Bloch to write a fictionalized, Freudian account of Gein. Alfred Hitchcock then bought the rights to this book and made it into his film Psycho.
Klavan reads Psycho as “the tragedy of the age,” a narrative that shows the horror wrought by the lie that we realize our authentic selves in pursuit of our desires. He furthers this point through examinations of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, and other slasher films. Klavan clarifies that most films in this genre are “exploitative garbage, featuring half-naked women ripped to pieces for thrills,” which would seem to undercut their value, even if they show the dark side of a culture liberated from repression.
The third murder Klavan considers is the first one chronologically: Cain’s killing of Abel. He briefly mentions John Steinbeck’s remarkable novel East of Eden, which probes the significance of this story. But this chapter mostly takes readers on a whirlwind tour through Lord Byron’s Cain; The Brothers Karamazov; Job; the 1991 movie The Rapture; Albert Camus’s The Rebel; René Girard; C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce; and more. Klavan concludes that “the legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.” And while he rightly asserts that “Jesus is the door out of [this] history [and] into another kingdom altogether,” his digressive tour doesn’t really show how this is so.
The final three chapters are briefer and more personal. Klavan relates how he was brought to faith in part through reading the works of Marquis de Sade, “an atheist sexual psychopath so vicious we named sadism after him.” He realized that without God, no morality can restrain depraved human desires: “Everything else is a facade, oppressive delusions and constructs imposed on us by a society trying to preserve its order and hierarchies. Power is the only reality.” While the original sadist brought Klavan to love the God who gives his body for us, an atheist psychiatrist showed him the power of personal, genuine love to heal his sick and confused soul, and a virtual reality van Gogh exhibit sent him spinning through an imagined survey of Western art.
A persistent source of frustration in reading Klavan’s potted summaries of paintings, books, and films is his assumption that artists merely reflect their culture. If you find a work of art lacking or degenerate, he writes, “don’t blame the artist, blame the spirit of the age.” This is, of course, the villain Edmund’s defense in King Lear when he declares that “men / Are as the time is,” thus rationalizing his murderous deeds. Yet culture is never monolithic; Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor situate sin and evil in very different narratives than do Nietzsche or Woody Allen.
Even if a work of art brilliantly reveals “man’s soul in the age through which it is living,” that doesn’t necessarily make it worth our attention. Psycho may portray a “penitent sinner joyfully washing her sins away until she is murdered for the voyeur’s sadistic pleasure by a man dressed up as a woman.” But even if this is “a prophetic picture of the days to come,” I don’t see how that makes it “a work of art indeed” or how I would be edified by watching it.
And how much more dangerous might it be to create such dark narratives? Klavan describes being sucked into sadomasochist pornography while doing research for a character in one of his novels. When the novel was finished, he writes, his connection to this character “snapped,” and his porn addiction abruptly ended too. But he told his wife he was done writing novels: “I can’t keep going into every dark corner of my mind just to get a story out of it. It’s not a sane way to live.”
Of course, as a writer, Klavan can no more stop writing stories than an endurance runner can stop running, but he doesn’t seem to take seriously the dangers his dark narratives may pose to his own soul. The gory spectacles that unfolded in the Roman Colosseum certainly reflected the decadence of the late empire, but Augustine’s Confessions doesn’t condone Alypius’s disordered desire to drink in their violence.
So how might art hold evil within an act of love? Klavan concludes his final chapter with a lovely meditation on Michelangelo’s Pietà and its portrayal of divine love that suffers and dies to rescue straying humanity. He writes:
It is a marble image of the greatest suffering we know of, the saddest thing that can ever happen: a mother who has lost her child, a mother mourning her dead child. … It is God himself who lies there dead. … The world that began with the murder of Abel has evolved into the kingdom of murder, the kingdom of Cain.
Yet perhaps Michelangelo’s art can evoke the divine art for which we hope: “If out of this cosmic catastrophe of injustice, the hands of a mortal man can sculpt such perfect beauty, then what beauty can God not carve out of this sorrowful world in the liquid white marble of eternity?”
The critic George Steiner once claimed that art—and perhaps, in particular, art made by those who hope in Christ—is stamped by Holy Saturday. This is abundantly true of the Pietà. Non-Christians can attest to the horrible realities epitomized by God’s death on Good Friday. Injustice and suffering and meaninglessness mark all our lives. And non-Christians, as Klavan notes, also have analogies to the New Jerusalem: They place their hope in some vision, whether “therapeutic or political … social or messianic.”
But the long hours of Holy Saturday give shape to art that wraps the worst human sin in the form of love. As Steiner writes:
The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?
Such patience, the capacity to suffer well, is the gift that true art can make from even the worst atrocities. And so Klavan wisely concludes with Michelangelo’s life-giving creation, inviting readers to “linger just a little while and see what happens next.”
Jeffrey Bilbro is professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.
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