The Kingdom Of Cain

When the world feels thick with bad news—violence on the headlines, cynicism in the air—how do you keep your capacity for joy and moral clarity alive? In The Kingdom of Cain, Andrew Klavan argues that the surest way to see the light is to look unflinchingly into the dark. He contends that murder—real, imagined, and retold—exposes the moral order written on the heart, and that art made from darkness can become an act of love, a creative answer to evil that rekindles our capacity for joy.

Klavan’s core claim is bold: evil is the absence of love, and murder, as the ultimate denial of another’s reality before God, starkly reveals the truth of goodness. By tracing how artists have mythologized notorious murders—across novels, plays, and films—he shows how the imagination can confront evil without capitulating to nihilism. The opposite of murder, he writes, is creation. And true art, even when it depicts violence, can become an act of creation that restores meaning in the face of loss. (Compare Raymond Chandler’s insight: “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.”)

Where Klavan Takes You

You’ll walk two intertwined paths. First, Part 1 (“The Art of Murder”) explores three murder cycles and their cultural reverberations:

• From Pierre François Lacenaire to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, then Nietzsche, on to Leopold and Loeb, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope—all asking whether a world without God can still defend the sanctity of life.
• From Ed Gein to Robert Bloch’s Psycho to Hitchcock’s film and the slasher genre to The Silence of the Lambs—probing what happens when psychoanalysis tries (and fails) to explain evil away.
• Back to the first murder—Cain and Abel—to recover five themes that shape all art and history: the knowledge of good and evil, sin and sex, the battle of brothers, murder as suicide, and murder as sacrifice.

Second, Part 2 (“The Practice of Creation”) turns practical and personal. Klavan gives three countermeasures against despair, grounded in embodied faith, disciplined love, and beauty:

• Ritual and communion (“This Is My Body”) as a school for reality—training your body to perceive spiritual truth.
• Therapy rightly ordered (“The Prison of Desire”)—escaping self-repeating scripts through love, not license.
• Beauty as theodicy (“A Certain Splendor”)—how great art can become a lived argument that suffering can be transfigured.

Why This Matters Now

Klavan insists that ideas aren’t abstractions—they are “both the light we see by and the path we tread.” When elites rationalize the inhuman (from political terror to the disposability of life), you are already breathing the atmosphere of the “zone of interest”—his phrase for the ordinary moral compromise that lets atrocities proceed next door while we go about our day. The arts, he argues, can either reinforce this haze or cut through it. The literature of darkness can clarify your vision, provided it is true art that transfigures its subject through creation.

Core Claim

“To write about murder and the imagination is to write about confronting evil, which is the absence of love, with creation, which is the telos of love—love, which is the source of every joy.”

How the Book Works

Klavan is a novelist and critic, not a theologian, so he writes with storyteller’s pace and scene-level detail. He opens with a definition of evil grounded in what he calls the Great Speculation: that other people are as real to themselves as you are to you—and equally dear to God. Accept this, and morality becomes the perception of a spiritual truth, not merely a social construct. Reject it, and you drift toward the Marquis de Sade’s logic—pleasure as the only standard, power the only means—a path Dostoevsky and Nietzsche both saw when “God is dead” becomes a cultural fact (see Susan Neiman’s and Albert Camus’s related treatments of modern evil).

In this guide, you’ll discover how a French celebrity-murderer entranced the Romantics; why Hitchcock’s shower scene is both morally serious and culturally prophetic; how Woody Allen’s murder stories attempt to live without conscience; why Foucault’s trajectory from theory to death is not an accident; and how Cain’s first blow echoes across Scripture, art, and your own choices. You’ll then learn how communion and ritual restore sight in a materialist age, how sane psychotherapy requires love and limits (not libertinism), and how the Pietà can serve as a luminous answer to Ivan Karamazov’s anguished protest.

What You’ll Take With You

You’ll come away with a bracing conviction: you can face darkness without losing joy. In fact, if you confront it truthfully—and create from it—the joy grows. The goal isn’t sentimental uplift, but the quiet courage to recognize evil as privation (Augustine), love as the soul’s native light (the Gospels), and beauty as the surprising sign that even murder, viewed through art and the cross, can be met by a stronger word: creation.

Klavan begins his cultural x-ray with a 19th-century French killer who turned himself into a minor celebrity: Pierre François Lacenaire. Elegant, literary, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” Lacenaire murdered a blackmailer and the man’s bedridden mother in 1834, then performed nonchalance on the way to the guillotine. Romantics and realists alike—Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire—were fascinated. Dostoevsky called him “enigmatic, frightening, and gripping.”

From Lacenaire to Raskolnikov

Dostoevsky threaded Lacenaire’s pose into Crime and Punishment (1866) and asked a piercing question: what happens to conscience when “God is dead”? He gives you Rodion Raskolnikov, a decent but fevered ex-law student who murders a pawnbroker “with an axe,” rationalizing it as a great man’s right. When he accidentally kills the pawnbroker’s innocent sister Lizaveta, the moral order crashes in. It is not the police who hunt him, but reality: the faces of the poor, the tenderness of Sonia, the ache of his own heart. He confesses; Siberia becomes the beginning of his renewal. (Compare with Camus’s The Stranger, where moral stupor replaces renewal.)

Nietzsche Hears the Echo—and So Do Killers

Friedrich Nietzsche, “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn,” read Dostoevsky and drove the axiom further: if God is absent, the “übermensch” must write a new morality beyond good and evil. That idea migrated from philosophy to crime. In 1924, two brilliant Chicago teens—Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—decided to prove their superiority by committing the “perfect murder,” kidnapping and killing 14-year-old Bobby Franks, then explaining it all to the press as an experiment “like impaling a beetle.” Clarence Darrow saved them from the gallows with a three-day plea that made psychology trump justice.

Art kept metabolizing the murder. Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope (1929) staged a dinner party served on the trunk containing the corpse. Its climactic figure, Rupert Cadell, shrugs at first, but when he sees the body his ironies fall away and conscience returns with thunder: “You have committed a sin and blasphemy against that very life which you now find so precious.” Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) re-set the action to Manhattan and, in the shadow of the Holocaust, made Nietzsche’s link to Hitler explicit. Yet the film’s Cadell dodges full responsibility—an artistic reminder that elites often want the frisson of transgression without owning its logic.

Can You Live Without Conscience?

Woody Allen tries twice to answer Dostoevsky’s insistence that conscience is inescapable: in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005), adulterous men who murder their mistresses get away with it and (more or less) sleep at night. Allen’s point is stark: morality is a fiction you can discard if you are willing to accept the contingencies of chance. Klavan counters: this is precisely what Dostoevsky predicted would happen when a culture tries to live after the death of God. Conscience becomes a fashion; cadences of evil become “interesting.”

Ideas Have Bodies

“Embrace a lie, and you will end up in perdition, convinced, like Milton’s Satan, that you have made a heaven out of hell.”

Foucault and the Endgame of Power

Michel Foucault radicalized Nietzsche: if all is power, then even truth, the self, and the body are social constructs. He “transvalued” values in the bathhouses of San Francisco, embracing S&M as liberation while AIDS stalked the scene. For Klavan, this is not a footnote but a fateful proof: the will-to-power, stripped of love, reduces people to meat. What began in Lacenaire’s preening and Raskolnikov’s self-justification culminates in a culture where transgression is a talisman and victims are props. (René Girard’s counter-theory is crucial here: the Gospel unmasks scapegoating and ends the sacred theater of violence.)

The lesson for you is sobering and freeing. Sobering, because elegant ideas can license horrors when they deny the Great Speculation—that other people are as real as you and dear to God. Freeing, because the arts that tell the truth (Hamilton’s Rope, Hitchcock at his best, Dostoevsky) can pry open conscience and restore the splendor of the moral law. Art cannot resurrect the dead—but it can keep you from living like one.

The second murder-cycle begins in America’s heartland with a handyman whose house of horrors re-wrote cinema. Ed Gein, a socially odd, mother-dominated man in 1950s Plainfield, Wisconsin, murdered women and exhumed corpses, fashioning bowls from skulls, lampshades from human skin, and clothing from female flesh. When police opened his shed in 1957, they found Bernice Worden’s body hanging like a deer. The town was stunned; the nation, riveted.

From Plainfield to the Shower

Robert Bloch lived 35 miles away and distilled the crimes into a potboiler, Psycho (1959). He invented Norman Bates—a mother-haunted motel keeper who becomes his dead mother in order to kill. Alfred Hitchcock saw in Bloch’s novel the seed for a severe, black-and-white experiment in fear. He slashed budgets, borrowed TV techniques, and filmed what would become the most famous murder scene in film history: the shower sequence. Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane, a thief considering repentance, steps under the water—an image of baptism and cleansing—when “Mother” rips aside the curtain and the violins scream. You never see the knife pierce flesh, yet you feel the violation. The camera starts with Norman’s voyeur-eye and ends on Marion’s lifeless eye: a visual catechism in the wages of lust and murder.

Hitchcock adds a long “headshrinker explains it all” coda, a concession to the period’s Freudian vogue. But Klavan points out how the film undercuts the neatness. Psycho’s psychiatrist offers tidy motives; the picture, however, shows you something more tragic: when the spiritual drama of sin, repentance, and mercy is replaced with technique and diagnosis, you do not cure evil—you misname it.

The Slasher and His Children

Psycho spawned a genre: the slasher. One of the earliest, Black Christmas (1974), juxtaposed obscene phone calls and a sorority house with Advent hymns and a subplot about abortion—turning the Nativity season into an anti-Nativity. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) translated Gein’s cannibal hints into Leatherface, while John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) crafted the Final Girl (Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh) and a psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, who rejects psychoanalytic euphemism: Michael Myers is “purely and simply evil.” As the genre matured, the psychiatrist himself became suspect—Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) unmasked the shrink as the killer—and then a cannibal-genius, Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Harris’s novel (and Jonathan Demme’s film) offers a moral clarity late slashers lack. Jame Gumb kills women to don their skins; Lecter “eats” the quantifiers who would reduce souls to data. Clarice Starling, formed by compassion (the screaming lambs), treats the bodies of victims with reverence, reading painted fingernails as signs of inner dignity. The contrast is not incidental: Clarice’s human way of seeing reveals what the killer cannot—bodies signify persons, not meat. (This aligns with John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” and with C. S. Lewis’s insistence that matter is the language of spirit.)

A Prophecy in Film

Psycho’s baptismal shower turned to slaughter anticipates a culture that confuses freedom with license, therapy with absolution, the body with meat—and then wonders why the lambs keep screaming.

What This Teaches You About “Explanation”

You live in a therapeutic age that prefers causes to culpability. Psycho and its children show you the hazard: when psychiatry becomes the final court of appeal, it can end by excusing what it names—or by becoming the monster it diagnoses. Klavan’s critique isn’t anti-therapy; he later writes movingly about the “talking cure” that saved his life. It is anti-reductionism. Evil cannot be fully explained by libido theory or brain chemistry because evil is a privation of love, not a glitch in neurons. Art that knows this (Hitchcock at his best, Harris’s novel) helps you keep your soul awake in a world that would medicate it to sleep.

Klavan’s third arc returns to the first murder not as antiquarianism but as a template. Genesis 2–4 contains the Bible’s first references to sex, birth, sin, sacrifice, and death; in that sense, every human story is a footnote to Cain and Abel. Klavan distills five recurring themes that frame history and art—and your moral life.

1) The Knowledge of Good and Evil

Why forbid a fruit that gives knowledge? Milton’s Satan boasts the mind can “make a Heaven of Hell,” but post-Eden man sees moral reality in time, without the frame of eternity. That partial sight makes him a judge without jurisdiction—and therefore bitter. Lord Byron’s Cain, tutored by Lucifer in deep time, sees extinctions and storms and rages at God’s injustice. C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, replies: in eternity, “Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” Until then, moral knowledge divorced from worship becomes a cudgel. (Susan Neiman’s trilemma—evil, God’s goodness, God’s power—presses here; Klavan’s answer is artistic and incarnational.)

2) Sex and Sin

After the Fall, Adam and Eve feel shame; desire and domination fracture communion. Augustine and Aquinas both taught it’s not sex but concupiscence—disordered desire—that’s the problem. Klavan shows how this misreading mutates culturally: from monks who blame women’s bodies, to Ed Gein’s mother, who dressed him as a girl while preaching that women are “tainted,” to modern ideologies that attempt to dissolve womanhood altogether. He offers a counter-vision with Milton’s frank celebration of marital eros and with Paul’s language: the body as a language in which spouses enact the mystery of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5). The issue isn’t bodies; it’s whether you use bodies as signs of communion—or as props for power.

3) The Battle of Brothers

After Cain, Scripture repeats a pattern of younger sons supplanting older ones (Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph over his brothers, David the youngest). René Girard’s insight clarifies the dynamic: “mimetic desire” breeds rivalry; violence spirals until cultures discharge tension by scapegoating. The Gospel unmasks this mechanism by revealing the scapegoat’s innocence in Jesus. Klavan’s point is piercingly personal: you can live in a running feud with shadows of rivals—or recognize that the true battle is with your own desires, not your brother.

4) Murder as Suicide

Ancient commentators noticed that Genesis 4:10 literally reads “your brother’s bloods cry out,” as if Abel’s unborn descendants cry for justice. Philo suggested the text could almost be read, “Cain rose up and killed himself.” Klavan explains: to murder is to annihilate the image of God, which also lives in you. The Targum Neofiti imagines Cain denying judgment and heaven; Abel affirms both. When Cain kills Abel, he kills the believer within—the part of himself that can still see reality under God.

5) Murder as Sacrifice

Why was Cain’s offering rejected? Not because he brought vegetables, but because he lacked faith (Hebrews 11). Without faith, sacrifice collapses into bribery. God begins to re-educate humanity, substituting animals for people (the ram for Isaac), declaring, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” When Israel imitates the nations and returns to child sacrifice in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna), Jesus will later make Gehenna the emblem of ultimate judgment. Klavan connects this to contemporary forms of “sacrifice” that justify the killing of innocents by ideology. Your antidote is worship that sees beyond time: you offer the best because you trust the Giver, not to manipulate Him.

Each theme lands close to home. Every sleepless resentment is a brother-struggle. Every click that reduces a body to an object replays Eden. Every attempt to buy God’s blessing with performance rather than trust re-enacts Cain’s bargain. And every time you refuse to scapegoat, to worship, and to create, you strike a blow—this time against Cain.

Before the tours of murder and myth, Klavan stakes a definition: evil is the rejection of the Great Speculation and therefore the absence of love. The Great Speculation states that other people are as real to themselves as you are to you—and equally dear to God. Accept this, and morality isn’t a utility; it’s your perception of spiritual reality. Deny it, and you drift toward materialism, where desire and power become the only coins in circulation.

Sade vs. Jesus

Klavan’s decisive intellectual moment came reading the Marquis de Sade, the atheist whose logic is pitilessly consistent: if there is no God, the “heaviest dose of agony in others ought, assuredly, to be as naught” to you; seek your pleasure, even by cruelty. Klavan recognized: Sade is the honest atheist; Nietzsche and Foucault add rhetorical filigree, but the core is the same. He turned—his only “leap”—to the axiom that goodness is real, thus God is real, thus the person before you carries a dignity reason alone cannot mint. (Compare Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: when shared metaphysics collapse, rival “moralities” devolve into emotivism.)

Materialism’s Mask Slips

In a world where only bodies and appetites count, “right” becomes a negotiated truce among egos; conscience a mood. Arthur Schopenhauer thought “right” is merely the negation of “wrong.” Klavan flips this with Augustine: goodness is primary; evil is privation. Human experience corroborates it. If you treat principles as mere restraints on a “true self” that is nothing but hunger, you feel more fake, not more free. Love—willing the other’s good as yours—reveals who you are; lust, envy, and cruelty are obstacles to that identity. In other words, you are someone only insofar as you love.

Murder and the Imago Dei

This is why murder, in Klavan’s account, is the acid test: it is the categorical denial of the image of God. You can prettify it with ideologies (“rights,” “purity,” “necessity”), but every such story is a spell that numbs you to the real presence of another soul. Through Solzhenitsyn, Klavan reminds you: ideology is how “evildoing” gets its justification, so you can accept honors while bathed in innocent blood. Artists who collude with that are not neutral: they lend the lie their light. Artists who refuse the spell push reality back into focus.

Test for Any Moral Argument

If your theory permits you to treat another’s life as expendable—especially the powerless—your theory is false, or you are not ready to be human under it.

Creation as Answer

Here is Klavan’s creative turn. Since evil is the absence of love, you cannot defeat it merely by denouncing it; you must out-create it. That’s why he writes detective fiction: “a tragedy with a happy ending.” Death “writes the rules” of the game, but the sleuth’s search for “a hidden truth” restores meaning and human dignity. To put it personally: if cynicism has you by the throat, go make something true and beautiful—a meal, a letter of contrition, a song. Creation is your vote of confidence in the moral order. (See also Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker: our making images divine making.)

For you, this provides a bright-line test in a confused age: any account of humanity that cannot explain why murder is categorically wrong is unfit for builders, lovers, and friends. Any art that makes murder merely interesting is unworthy of your attention. Hold onto this, and the kingdom of Cain will not steal your joy.

Klavan loves the world—the taste of good wine, the ache of a love song, the hilarity of a great joke. His question is your question: can you savor creaturely goods without becoming their captive? His answer, learned by experience, is that ritual—especially communion—trains your body to know what your mind alone can forget: material things are sacraments, not ends in themselves.

From Desire to Transposition

C. S. Lewis helps here. We long to “be united with the beauty we see.” But you can’t “study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace,” nor analyze repentance while repenting (Lewis’s “transposition”). The body is the instrument by which spirit is known; ecstasy can be eros and adoration (think Bernini’s Teresa). Don’t flatten spirit to sensation; learn to read sensation as spirit’s language. Klavan confesses writing a novel that dragged him through S&M porn as research; when the book ended, the compulsion snapped. Why? Because he returned to the rituals and loves that re-harmonize appetite with meaning.

“This Is My Body”

In communion, bread and wine are not props; they are training. Whether or not you affirm transubstantiation, ritual does what argument can’t: it habituates your senses to perceive reality sacramentally. The body of Jesus is the image of God; bread and wine are the image of his body; you receive them, and your body learns the grammar of love. You stop trying to “get something” from the world and begin to give yourself to it. (Note the contrast with the therapeutic culture’s “destigmatize everything” mantra; ritual re-stigmatizes what harms love.)

Rethinking Eden

Klavan ventures a speculative but suggestive reading: perhaps Eden already included death—but within the consciousness of eternity. The Fall wasn’t the introduction of mortality as such, but the loss of seeing life and death in God’s endless now. Eat the fruit of judgment, and you view life in the narrow bandwidth of self; you lose the capacity to “translate” the world into its true key. Communion (and marriage, charity, liturgy) re-teach this translation, so you can live now with the joy that belongs to forever.

Practices for You

Receive communion attentively. Keep sabbath boundaries for body and soul. Treat sex as a sign of covenant, not a performance. Make small beautiful things regularly (a meal, a poem, a hand-written note). Ritual is how love becomes muscle memory.

For someone who loves great food, laughter, and cinema, this isn’t a retreat from the world; it’s fullness. “He likes matter. He invented it,” Lewis quips. Klavan agrees—and shows you how to keep loving the world without being devoured by it.

Klavan’s most intimate chapter is about therapy—and why the “talking cure” worked for him though Freud’s theories did not. In his late twenties, crippled by depression and delusion, he entered analysis with a New York psychiatrist (“Dr. F”). Over two years he experienced what he can only call a miracle: he went from suicidal blackness to steady joy. The key turned out not to be Freud’s system, but love.

Why the Cure Worked

Freud got much wrong (Oedipus as universal, religion as wish-projection). But he and the neo-Freudians saw something vital: our early bonds form templates (“stereotypes”) we unconsciously re-enact with others. In the room, you project your inner cast onto the therapist—father, judge, betrayer. A good therapist doesn’t play the ghosts; he remains himself—patient, morally sane, present. Your phantoms exhaust themselves, and you finally encounter a real person, not an echo. That encounter, Klavan says, was love: being known without being used. It unlocked gratitude, agency, and hope. (Think Martin Buber’s I–Thou.)

Therapy vs. Therapeutic Culture

The cure is not the same as the culture. A humane therapy helps you step out of self-enclosed scripts so you can love. A therapeutic culture, by contrast, flatters appetite and denies limits, calling libertinism freedom. Klavan traces how this mistake fuels abortion on demand, sexual commodification, and the “butchering of children” under the banner of identity. He’s blunt: begin with “there is no God,” and Sade’s calculus returns—bodies become meat for pleasure or policy. Begin with “Christ is Lord,” and you can see the world as it is, even when you fail.

Roles as Icons, Not Masks

To move beyond therapy, embrace your vocations as living icons: men as courage, women as grace; fathers as justice, mothers as mercy; friends as companions of the mind. You will enact them uniquely—but not arbitrarily. You don’t invent Hamlet; you interpret him faithfully. In doing so, you become available to others as love, not as a mirror of their wounds.

A Pastoral Takeaway

When you talk with someone in despair, don’t preach first. Be present, ask questions, refuse to play the ghost. Love will often make the argument Godward better than your argument can.

In short: therapy redeemed by love can free you from the “prison of desire” so you can be the kind of person who creates. That freedom is not the license to do what you want; it’s the power to love what is good—and to act accordingly.

The book ends in a museum of the mind. You pass ruins of broken gods, climb through galleries from Botticelli’s Madonnas to Venus, past Impressionist light, into Picasso’s fractures, Duchamp’s urinal, Pollock’s drips, even a modern prank of blank canvases titled Take the Money and Run. Then you mount a spiral stair and find the room of white: Michelangelo’s Pietà—Mary holding her murdered Son.

A Walk Through Art’s Loss and Recovery

Botticelli shows how flesh and spirit can rhyme: Mary crowned by light, Christ the seed that will bleed; Venus arriving from the sea, a pagan echo of longing. But as metaphysics thins, form collapses. Impressionists paint the eye’s effects; Cubists shatter the person; Duchamp calls a urinal a fountain. The body’s meaning gets lost; so does the person’s. It is an artistic parable of Nietzsche’s “God is dead”—and of civilization’s drift toward treating people as arrangements of matter, not bearers of mystery.

The Pietà’s Answer

Here is Klavan’s theodicy—not a syllogism, but a sight. If a mortal can carve such terrifying beauty from the image of ultimate loss—a mother bereaved, the Innocent slain—what can God carve from history’s grief in the “liquid white marble of eternity”? This is not to belittle Ivan Karamazov’s protest on behalf of tortured children; it is to show a wedge of light: the Cross is not an idea about suffering, it is God within suffering, and the resurrection is the pledge that beauty will “work backwards” through time.

A Practical Theodicy

Make something beautiful from your pain. Write the letter, compose the melody, bake the loaf, raise the child with patience. Your small Pietàs argue—quietly but really—that suffering can be transfigured.

Wait in the Kingdom of Cain

Klavan doesn’t promise a tidy world. He invites you to “wait with the murdered God in the kingdom of Cain” and see what happens next. This is Christian hope at its most adult: joy without denial, courage without bravado, beauty without kitsch. If art “is a quality of redemption,” then your vocation—whatever it is—is to redeem the moment before you by making it true, good, and beautiful. That, finally, is how you rejoice evermore in a dark time.