The Kind Worth Killing: A Novel

“I would listen to these parties hum and roar through the walls of my bedroom as I lay in bed. They were familiar symphonies, beginning with bursts of laughter, discordant jazz, and the slap of screen doors, and ending, in the early morning hours, with the sound of yelling, sometimes sobbing, and always the slam of bedroom doors.”

Lily’s description of her memories of Monk’s House reflects the chaotic nature of her upbringing. Even though Monk’s house sometimes represents safety, Lily remembers the ways that her parent’s lifestyle created a landscape of uncertainty and disruption. Swanson uses a run-on sentence to signify the overwhelming nature of these parties on Lily’s mental health.

“My chest hurt, as though the anger inside of me was a balloon, slowly inflating, but never going to pop…I sat on the tiled floor, and cried until my throat hurt. I was thinking of Chet—the scary way he looked at me—but I was also thinking of my parents. Why did they fill our home with strangers? Why did they only know sex maniacs?”

Swanson uses the imagery of a balloon inside of Lily’s chest to symbolize the fear that she feels when Chet stares at her in her bathing suit. Lily’s fear of Chet manifests in anger towards her parents because they are supposed to protect their child. This moment signifies Lily’s exposure to the threat of the outside world, which finally culminates in Chet’s sexual abuse.

“Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

Lily’s justification of murder comes from her understanding of life and death. Lily does not see anything wrong with helping people towards death, even if it seems early to other people. Swanson’s inclusion of the title of the novel highlights the significance of this quote because it shows how Lily believes she has the power to decide who lives and who dies.

“If you killed your wife, you would only be doing to her what would happen anyway. And you’d save other people from her. She’s a negative. She makes the world worse. And what she’s done to you is worse than death…She struck the first blow.”

Lily equates Miranda’s infidelity with justification for murder. Lily uses dehumanizing language, such as when she calls Miranda “a negative.” Lily also manipulates Ted by appealing to his arrogance because she insinuates that he would be saving other people by murdering his wife, even though in reality he would only be doing it for himself.

“In no time at all there would be all new people on the planet, and everyone who was on the planet now would have died, some terribly, and some like the flick of a switch. The real reason that murder was considered so transgressive was because of the people that were left behind…But what if someone was not really loved?”

As Ted wrestles with his decision over whether he should murder Miranda, he tricks himself into believing that no one will miss Miranda. Ted foreshadows Lily’s thoughts at the end of the novel, thinking that there will be new people on the planet in the future, and no one will remember anything they do in the present. This philosophy of nihilism soothes Ted’s guilt because he convinces himself that anyone who loves Miranda will soon forget their pain and grief.

“People make a big deal of the sanctity of life, but there’s so much life in this world, and when someone abuses his power or, as Miranda did, abuses your love for her, that person deserves to die. It sounds like an extreme punishment, but I don’t think of it that way. Everyone has a full life, even if it ends soon. All lives are complete experiences.”

Lily addresses the possible fallacies in her system of morality by stating that she does not believe in the sanctity of life, and therefore murder does not hold any weight for her. Lily believes that any abuse should result in mortal punishment. This belief encourages her to take the justice system in her own hands, acting as a god-like figure.

“‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.’ I know it’s not justification for murder, but I think it underscores how so many people think that all humans deserve a long life, when the truth is that any life at all is probably more than any of us deserves. I think most people fetishize life to the point of allowing others to take advantage of them.”

Lily quotes T. S. Eliot to highlight her belief in the fleetingness of life. Since any moment of life is more than people deserve, Lily believes that murder is not a crime. This quote emphasizes the theme of Moral Ambiguity and the Justification of Murder because Lily uses her own system of morality to absolve herself of her crimes.

“But she wouldn’t grow old, would she? I was going to kill her, wasn’t I? That was the plan, and the thought of doing it, and getting away with it, filled me with a sense of gratification and power, but also fear and sadness. I hated my wife, but I hated her because I had loved her once. Was I making a mistake that I would regret for the rest of my life?”

Ted’s conflict over murdering his wife highlights the theme of Power Dynamics and Manipulation in Relationships. Ted’s honesty about his feelings over murdering Miranda shows the rush of power that it gives him. He realizes that murdering Miranda would be about expressing dominance over his wife.

“He was a negative in this world…I thought about Brad coming to a sudden end, and I didn’t really mind. In fact, I wanted it to happen. Not just because it would punish Brad for what he was doing with my wife, but also because Brad disappearing off this earth would be a good thing. Whose life was he making better?”

This quote shows how Lily’s manipulation sinks into Ted’s psyche. He starts to think like her, using dehumanizing language to prepare himself for killing Brad. Ted demonizes Brad so that he can go through with murder.

“That’s all we’re doing, then. We’re creating an earthquake, one that will bury them both. And if we do it right, everyone, including the police detectives assigned to the case, will naturally assume that Miranda was murdered by Brad, and that Brad skipped town.”

Lily uses the earthquake imagery to equate their plan to murder Miranda with a natural disaster. As soon as Ted starts to waver in his resolve to murder Miranda, Lily pulls him back in with her manipulation, claiming that what they are going to do is no different than an earthquake that buries two people.

“I thought about what I planned to do to Eric later that night and tried to feel bad about it. I compared him with Chet, who wanted to have sex with a child, but at least Chet didn’t pretend to love anyone. Eric was bad through and through, someone who would go through life taking only what he wanted and hurting the ones who loved him. I had handed him my love—my life really—and he had treated each with disdain.”

Lily’s anger towards Eric surpasses even her anger for Chet because she believes that Eric pretends to be a good person. Lily hates Eric’s hypocrisy even more than Chet’s pedophilia. Swanson uses repetitive language of words such as “my love,” “my life,” and “through and through” to emphasize Lily’s frustration that heightens the more that she thinks about it (153).

“No one but us would ever know about the plans we had made. Miranda could have Brad, and I’d have Lily, and the world would keep on spinning. I had always been good at compartmentalizing, and I would put all my rage and shame over what had happened with Miranda into a box and close it.”

Ted’s decision to move on from their plan to murder Miranda seals his fate. In this moment, he treats the plan to murder Miranda as a passing fantasy, rather than a solidified plan. Before he dies, Ted feels hopeful that he can move on to a new life with Lily.

“Finishing my Guinness, I thought that my career as a murderer was over. Not because I had lost the stomach for it, but because there would never be the need. I would never allow anyone to get that close to me again, to hurt me in the way that Eric had…I had survived the vulnerability of childhood, and the danger of first love. There was comfort in knowing that I would never be in either of those positions again, that, from now on, I would be the only person responsible for my own happiness.”

Lily believes that there will never be another person in her life who will hurt her. Lily chooses isolation because she fears that closeness inevitably will lead to violence. This stems from her inability to move past the age when she was abused, and she reacts in childish ways because she does not know how else to process the world.

“And maybe I was excited to have a prey again. I will admit that. Killing was a little bit of an itch that I hadn’t scratched in many years.”

Even though Lily claims that she murders out of a need to survive, this quote reveals the underlying pleasure she gains from murdering. Lily sees herself as a predator and Miranda and Brad as the prey. Lily chooses to become a murderer because it is the only way she knows how to maintain agency and control.

“It was infuriating to listen to, and I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life waking up and looking over at the same face, growing older, and older, and snoring more and more…I’d have to smile when all I wanted to do was smash that stupid grin off his face.”

Miranda’s disgust over waking up next to a loving husband reveals her inner brokenness. Miranda does not want to feel loved and protected—she wants power and thrills. Swanson uses repetitive language with the word “older” to reveal the impending monotony that Miranda sees before her in her marriage with Ted.

“As a joke, I dyed my hair red and told Eric to just pretend that he had only one girlfriend…I imagined Eric and Lily in that country, in love, and it didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, it made me laugh.”

Miranda’s description of her knowledge of Eric’s infidelity towards Lily reveals Miranda’s lack of empathy. The fact that she dyes her hair to match Lily’s hair as a twisted joke shows that she is incapable of seeing how her actions affect other people. Miranda does not feel remorse for her actions but delights in the deception.

“I could picture her long red hair, and her green eyes, so much like a cat’s but her face kept slipping in and out of my mind’s grasp. But more than her physical presence, I had been taken in by her almost otherworldly self-possession, and the way she inhabited her book-lined cottage in the woods of Winslow. Was she lonely out there all alone? Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn’t need other humans in her life?”

Kimball’s inability to remember the exactness of Lily’s facial features represents the mysteriousness of Lily’s nature. However, Kimball is the first person to wonder about Lily’s happiness and loneliness. Although he does not know the depth of Lily’s loneliness, he sees her as a human being, rather than as an object.

“‘Rare breed of animal’, my father had once called me, and that’s what I felt like. Totally alive, and totally alone. My only companion at that moment was my younger self, the one who tipped Chet down the well. I imagined she was there with me. We locked eyes, not needing to speak to each other. We understood that survival was everything. It was the meaning of life. And to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive. I blinked, and my younger self disappeared. She came back into me, and together we drove to New York City.”

David’s description of Lily being “a rare breed of animal” ties into Swanson’s allusion of Lily being a predator (342). Lily’s vision of her younger self calms her because she can soothe herself with the reminder that they have survived another ordeal. Lily’s belief that murdering someone is “the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive,” shows that she has not succumbed to the abuse of another person (342).

I thought about what my father had said to me the day before—how he wanted to get through the rest of his life without hurting anybody else. Maybe I could turn that into my goal, as well…I would continue to survive, knowing, as I’d known that night in the meadow, the stars pouring their light down on me, that I was special, that I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal—of a crow or a fox or an owl—and not of a normal human being.”

This quote mirrors Lily’s feelings after she killed Eric in London. Every time Lily scratches the itch of murder, she feels satisfied afterwards, until she inevitably wants to kill again. Lily finally concedes that she has a different morality than other people and wonders about her animalistic side.

“I stayed crouched, studying the headstone, wondering what Elizabeth Minot’s short, hard life had been like…My father used to say; every hundred years, all new people. I don’t know exactly why he said it, or what it meant to him—a variation on being mindful of death, I supposed—but I knew what it meant to me.”

Lily’s return to the Old Hill Burying Ground signifies the presence of death. Lily muses over the fact that no one exists who remembers Elizabeth Minot, just like no one in a hundred years will exist who will know Lily. Lily uses this as absolution from her crimes because she feels that the hurt that she perpetuates in her life will not be remembered.

“I felt an ache in my chest; not a familiar feeling, but one I recognized. It wasn’t that I felt bad about what I had done, or guilty. I didn’t. I had reasons—good ones—for everyone I’d killed. No, the ache in my chest was that I felt alone. That there were no other humans in the world who knew what I knew.”

Lily’s greatest struggles stem from her isolation. She lives with her secrets inside of her, without anyone to express them to. Lily never succumbs to guilt over her crimes, but she does ache with loneliness that reflects a type of guilt that she does not want to acknowledge.

“Would I have told him everything? Shared my life with him? And would that knowledge—the knowledge both of us would have had about each other—have made us stronger? Or would it have killed us in the end? Probably killed us, I thought, although it might have been nice for a while, nice to have someone with whom I could have shared it all.”

Lily’s grief over losing Ted stems more from her grief over losing their relationship and the possibility of connection with another person instead of prioritizing isolation to self-preserve. Swanson uses the repetitive questioning to signify Lily’s desire to know what could have happened, even though she believes that she may have ended up killing Ted as well.

“I imagined what that would feel like—to confess it all—and pictured the cold, fascinated eyes on me as I told the stories, and then I imagined that this fascination would hover around me for the rest of my life. All those years in prison. David Kintner’s infamous daughter. I would become a specimen, a curiosity. People would clamor to write books. I would lose all of my anonymity forever.”

Lily longs to express herself to another person and stop holding all her secrets, even if it means going to jail. However, Lily hates that she cannot be honest because of her father’s fame. She knows that her confession would turn her into a novelty, rather than a human being.