If God is gone, then what’s left?
Sometimes a book finds you when you need it and don’t even know you need it.
Over the last few years, I’ve read some of Andrew Klavan’s columns. He’s an excellent writer, the author of novels, film scripts and works of non-fiction.
So when I saw his latest book “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness” (Zondervan, 2025, 272 pages) on the “Hot Reads” shelf at my public library, I snatched it up, took it home and quickly found myself shoving aside work and household chores to keep on reading.
Here’s a gem with several facets: a bit of autobiography, a dip into psychoanalysis, a look at the atheism Klavan eventually rejected, long reflections on literature and thoughts on the Christianity he now treasures. Mostly, however, “The Kingdom of Cain” focuses on murder.
In his suspense and detective fiction, Klavan has often made murder the centerpiece of his story. Here he continues his investigation by looking at Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, then at three modern stories of murderers: Pierre Francois Lacenaire, “a violent thug and a third-rate thief” who in 1834 gained notoriety for his careless and sophisticated demeanor in a courtroom after murdering a con man and his mother; Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, students from wealthy homes who in 1924 brutally killed a 14-year-old boy while enamored with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche; and Ed Gein, a small-town Midwesterner, aged 50, who had for years murdered and committed various atrocities on the corpses of his victims before being apprehended in 1957.
Each of these real-life crimes formed the basis for the works of writers and screenwriters. In “Crime and Punishment,” Dostoevsky embodied the nihilism of Lacenaire in Rodion Raskolnikov, who murders a greedy pawn broker and her sister. A number of authors ran with the Leopold and Loeb story, and either used it straight-up or fictionalized it. Perhaps the best known of these works was Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rope” and Meyer Levin’s novel “Compulsion.” Ed Gein’s horrific killings gave rise to movies like “Psycho” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”
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In “The Kingdom of Cain,” Klavan doesn’t just make these connections; he dives into the books and films, and makes them mirrors for our culture and our beliefs. From the very beginning, he sets out to answer the question so many ask. “Rejoice evermore!” writes Paul in Thessalonians, to which Klavan responds, “But how can you rejoice in a world of so much darkness? At a time like twilight when darkness gathers, ready to fall?” He adds that “sorrow is so woven into the very fabric of material existence that to turn our faces from it is to turn away from life itself.”
In his discussion of atheists and philosophers like the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and Michael Foucault, Klavan digs even deeper into this basic question. He explores in depth the cultural edifice remaining when Judeo-Christian morality has crumbled. What he finds in that rotting shell of a house are the ideologies these philosophers and others designed and helped bring to life. Their foundations are power, will, and desire, just as they were for the murderers described by Klavan.
At one point, he explores Nietzsche’s ubermensch, a superior human being who in the absence of God serves as the ideal prototype for the rest of humanity. Leopold and Loeb believed themselves to be such creatures, beyond the standard measuring stick of good and evil. Of them, and to the rest of us, Klavan writes, “Nietzsche was right. Without God, the ubermensch must write the moral law. And Foucault was right. Without God, the ubermensch will be either a sadist or the masochist who submits to him unto death. Sade saw it all before them. This is the world if there is no God.”
A few pages later, Klavan adds, “Sade’s main point is this: if there is no God, if we are no more than matter, our desires are who we are … Everything else is a façade, oppressive delusions and constructs imposed on us by a society trying to preserve its order and hierarchies. Power is the only reality.”
The passages quoted above may mistakenly cause readers to view Klavan’s book as some heavyweight tome, meant more for the erudite than for the rest of us. Not so. It is a book whose message is available to anyone, and that message is crucial to our time. The 20th century was an era of giant leaps forward for all mankind, but it was also a time of tyrants, of fascists and communists who with the desire to change the world and with the will and power to do so, murdered millions of people they regarded as impediments to progress.
The 21st century brings new challenges. Politicians of all stripes still seek to impose their will on people, believing that they know what’s best for their inferiors. Waiting just off-stage, moreover, are the masters of artificial intelligence, who dream of perfecting an ignorant humanity with their machines and who believe that they and others may become as gods through that power. Klavan doesn’t touch on this development, but his book implies these dangers.
In his 1882 book “The Gay Science,” as cited by Klavan, Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? … Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Given the way the world has turned since Nietzsche offered up that eulogy, “The Kingdom of Cain” sparks some questions: How’s the philosophers’ declaration of God’s death working out for everybody? How will the human race fare as some people continue to see themselves as ubermenschen, or even divine beings, and demand that the unwashed and the ignorant genuflect before them?
Read Klavan’s book and see what you think.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
