Author Andrew Klavan is on a mission to find “God in the literature of darkness.”
According to a description of his new book, “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness,” Klavan explores “human nature to discover how we might find joy and beauty in the world while still being clear-eyed about the evil found in it.”
It’s a confrontation with the reality that evil is a very much a part of life; yet, through the power of God, one can see past the haze of wickedness and iniquity to discern and experience peace and truth.
That’s the subject of “The Kingdom of Cain,” a project he said helps explain why he often tackles projects in the crime genre.
“I’m a crime writer and I always get this letter, ‘You call yourself a Christian and you write about all these horrible things, and these horrible people’ and they say horrible things,” he said. “I was just trying to explain that I think that that’s an important thing to do. I think that it is actually a good thing to write about the evil that men do.”
Klavan believes important realities and lessons are embedded in these stories. Too often, he said, contemporary “squeaky-clean Christian storytelling” glosses over essential explorations of life — but it wasn’t always that way.
“When I look at the great works of Christian art, they’re very dark,” he said. “When you look at the great paintings, there’s a lot of martyrdom, a lot of crucifixion scenes, a lot of the reality of life and the harshness of life.”
Klavan said there are real-life implications to oversimplifying the existence of evil or pretending it’s not happening.
“As the Gospels tell us, it’s a very dark world, and, so, if your faith is based on this kind of happy talk idea that nothing bad happens or that everything is going to turn out all right because you have faith, I think you’re going to lose your faith pretty quickly when you confront the reality of life,” he said, explaining how he approaches the book and meets this reality. “This is a book about three real-life murders, and how they were turned into art, and what I glean from that art that really actually helps me, not only with my faith, but with my joy in a dark world.”
Klavan explores the evils of murder, the beauty of human life, and the importance of treating humans “as if they were sacred.” Life, too, holds beauty, as the author expressed, wrestling with the oftentimes juxtaposition of good and evil that is part of the human experience.
“I think the idea that we’re part of a beautiful design in which sometimes you come into patches of darkness in that design, that to me is something I can imagine,” Klavan said. “I can’t quite grasp it because I’m just a person, but I think that art gives you a hint of how that works — the fact that you can have a sculpture like the Pieta, the dead Jesus lying in his mother’s arms, and it can be so beautiful at the same time it’s so incredibly tragic. It tells me that there is a beauty that can come out of darkness.”
Klavan also discussed his own journey to the Lord, one that really began after he realized the moral order in life — the reality that there’s right and wrong and good and evil. It was something he first pondered deeply as a teenager after reading “Crime and Punishment.”
“That idea that you cannot justify some things, that some things are just evil, started me thinking,” he said. “I went through some bad times in my youth. I had real mental problems. I lost 10 years to mental struggle. I came out of that in what I believe to be in a miraculous way. … In two years, I went from being suicidal to being a joyful human being.”
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Literature once again sparked him along the journey when he read a book about a character who prayed and thought, “Well, if he can pray, I can pray.” It was a realization that “transformed everything” for Klavan. Later, he was baptized at age 49.
“It was a long, long journey,” he said. “Turning my life over to God was … such a relief. … It really has been a journey and it … informs everything that I think and write.”
Kavan hopes “The Kingdom of Cain” leaves readers thinking about the “overarching beauty in the world.”
“I just want people to understand that their faith is not fragile,” he said. “Their faith is not supposed to make them fragile. It’s not supposed to make them afraid. The world is what it is. We will have trouble in the world, but Christ has overcome the world.”
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