Surveying the Kingdom of Cain

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
— Carl Jung, Letter to Kendig B. Cully, 25 September 1931

You’re about to read a book review of Andrew Klavan’s The Kingdom of Cain. In full disclosure, I helped with some light editorial work for Mr. Klavan. By light editorial work, I mean that I hunted down footnotes that he appeared to effortlessly litter throughout his work. He would incorporate from both obscure and classic works without force. It’s impressive. In spite of the fact that a man possessing that much familiarity with Marquis De Sade should be viewed with general distrust, it was a joy to work on the book, and with Mr. Klavan.

Over the past five years, my career and some distal tragedies presented the world to me through a darker lens. As the world appeared more chaotic and wicked, a curious thing happened: I started to become more hopeful. The Kingdom of Cain offered language for this counterintuitive experience. Reading it doesn’t merely invite us to explore the shadowed alleys of human depravity, Klavan insists we recognize their proximity. Evil, he suggests, is not the strange exception, but the air we breathe. The “zone of interest” is the world we are called to love—to live in, but not of.

Klavan’s project is striking not because it is lurid, but because it is lucid. He shows how evil masquerades as insight, how ideology beautifies murder, and how art has, at times, abetted this cosplay. I believe that if someone is both intellectually curious and committed to a materialist worldview, they will eventually be drawn to examining or exploring the subject of murder. In spite of his thorough engagements with wicked things, here is where Klavan diverges from so many cultural critics: he does not descend into cynicism or contempt. Instead, as Klavan asserts, “when an artist uses his imagination to create a true work of art about murder, he is confronting death with art, making creation out of destruction, containing evil within an act of love.”

I’ve often quipped to people who inquire as to how I became a police officer that I just do it for the stories: sometimes they’re funny, but often they’re better off unshared at dinner parties. As someone who has often clung to stories to serve as an interpretive lens to make sense of life, I found Klavan’s insistence on the redemptive nature of art and creation to hold water. He cites Raymond Chandler: “In everything that can be called art, there is a quality of redemption.” This observation is true, even of expressions born out of despair. Despair comes from Old French desperer, and by extension from the Latin desperare (formed from de- meaning “down from” and sperare meaning “to hope”). Even tragedy, in its juxtaposition to redemption, points us to God—as we innately know we are experiencing something “down from hope.” From Genesis to Psycho, Klavan explores how our myths around murder are not just indulgent aesthetics but moral expressions. They reveal what we believe about redemption.

Klavan compliments and dissects artistic traditions he himself reveres. When he writes about Lacenaire, Nietzsche, or the cinematic glamorization of sociopathic violence, he does so as a lover of craft who also understands that technique devoid of moral vision is a tool of perdition. And yet, for all the book’s gravity, Klavan avoids the predictable tropes of Christianese righteous indignation. He is not dissuading his audience from stories of murder; he instead shows us that how we tell those stories reveals what we believe about the world.

Klavan’s reflections on communion, therapy, and beauty do not arrive as neat theological syllogisms or moralized platitudes. They are born from him stumbling and dancing through life. They are lived, personal, and embodied. Klavan frames communion as resistance: a physical act of grace in the midst of materialism and its inevitable conclusions. The table of the Lord is not merely a place of remembrance but a defiance against the reign of death: a place to share a dish and laugh with friends at world’s end.

Likewise, Klavan’s reflections on psychotherapy struck a familiar chord. While he acknowledges that secular therapy once served as a life-saving “miracle,” he recognizes that it has its limitations. “If you begin from the axiom there is no God, you can develop a philosophy that makes perfect internal sense, but it will not describe human life as we know it. If you begin with the axiom that Christ is Lord, you may yourself be guilty of every sin and self-delusion, but you can, if you work at it, see the world exactly as it is.” Though secular, Klavan portrays his psychotherapy experience as one bearing qualities of the divine. He was understood without being judged.

Klavan’s Missio Dei is to share the world as it is. He implies that it should be for all artists, and the best way to do that is to love the world—to love it in spite of all its brutality and beauty. Klavan conjures up an old label he used to describe himself: worldling. It’s one I’ve unabashedly stolen from time to time. As he approaches the end of his book, he writes: “For a worldling like me then, the question is this: can you take joy in the things of the flesh and yet hear the language of the spirit in them? Nothing comes to us in the world but through the body. Can you love the pleasures of the body and yet not become the body alone?” When you realize that you cannot love the world and simultaneously abstain from it, the answer is obvious.

Klavan’s final reflections on beauty are spoken with the gravitas of someone who has seen horror and refuses to look away. He insists that art is not a form of escapism. It is theodicy. “Because it is not in heaven, but in this world that we are called to rejoice, this world of such terrible darkness,” he writes. “It is here and now that we are commanded to make what we see into the beautiful.”

This is the heart of the paradox. The Kingdom of Cain does not offer a clean moral resolution. I have heard that as a Christian, I am to be set apart—to abstain from being yoked together with the viciousness of this world. But, I too am an artist (an utterly unaccomplished one, but still an artist). I have met some set-apart believers. In truth, they often bore me. Oftentimes, their art is didactic and they do not see the ding an sich. I don’t want to judge the world. I’d rather love it. Whether or not art portrays something beautiful or terrifying, it offers an invitation to joy. And, indeed, joy is an act of rebellion.

Klavan does not ask us to abandon the world of Cain. He asks us to create within it, to rejoice within it, and to redeem it. He does not flatter us with the delusions of moralistic tropes. For “there are no happy endings, not in this, the only life we know,” he writes. “No happy endings, no innocent cultures, no righteous people, no better yesterday or tomorrow.” Klavan insists that, “We are called to joy. Here. Now. In a world full of murder. In the Kingdom of Cain.”