How to Turn Your Serial Killer Into a Celtic Diety (Without Getting Sacrificed)Or: The Best Crimes Are Prayers in Disguise
Confession Time, Part II
As I mentioned in Part I of this two parter on the subject of theme in stories, I’ve been elbow-deep in rewrites of my second arson thriller short story the last couple of weeks. Not because the explosions weren’t flashy (who doesn’t like explosions) or the dialogue was flat, but because the story kept collapsing like a burned-out building in the first windstorm.
You ever have a draft that reads like Wikipedia with better verbs? All scaffolding, no soul.
Minor interlude to discuss cars: additional confession – I’m a car guy. I bought my first car shortly after I turned 16 and for years and years I owned the kind of cars that poor college students and/or people just starting out in a career own. Not beaters, but cars that often needed work and had a quite-a-bit-higher-than-zero chance of leaving me stranded.
Later on, after I’d gotten my feet under me financially, I bought a Honda CRX, and then sold it a couple of years later to but a Honda Accord. They were nice, got good gas mileage, didn’t attract attention from car prowlers or cops. But, they were just, you know…boring.
Fast forward a decade or so when I owned a couple of Ford Explorers that were similarly boring, but mostly reliable.
My financial fortunes continued to improve, and then I bought a Lexus. GS450. Loved the car. Every last little thing about it was thought out in autistic-engineer fashion. The example I always give people is that I live in the Seattle area. Rain is always an issue. When it’s raining and you open the trunk of your car, what happens to the water sitting on the trunk lid? It slides down and into the trunk. Suboptimal. But not in my Lexus. Because some Japanese engineer had carefully designed a gutter, a channel, on the body of the car so that water slid down the trunk lid, into the channel, and through a drain out the bottom of the car. Amazing.
One of the guys I worked for looked at my Lexus and commented that it was a nice car, but Lexuses “had no soul”. He drove a succession of BMW, Porsches, and Mercedes cars. Which in his view, had soul. I pointed out that they also had a quite-a-bit-higher-than-zero chance of leaving him stranded. Which seemed to me to be sliding backwards into the cars I didn’t want to own any more.
His comment must have had more influence on me than I’d thought or wanted, because I embarked on a several decade spree of owning Corvettes, BMWs, Porsches, Mercedes, and, in a weak moment, a Cobra replica. Pretty much all of which left me stranded at some point or other, and I became good friends with mechanics of all stripes.
So I’m back to boring cars again now that I’m either too old or too bruised by life’s idea of practical jokes any more.
So, back to theme. I finally realized the problem: I’d treated my villain like a checklist. Backstory. Motive. Weapon. Done. But villains aren’t math problems. They’re curses made flesh. They need more.
Which brings me to the first realization of thematic alchemy: Your killer isn’t a character. They’re a landslide.
Ares in Armani: Stealing Divine Rot
When Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice, “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” he’s not just being cheeky. He’s flexing divinity wrapped in tailored silk. Hannibal isn’t human—he’s Ares, the god of war, sipping Bordeaux instead of blood. Every iconic killer draws power from mythic rot. Great villains aren’t just murderers. They’re rituals in flesh. Hannibal Lecter isn’t just a cannibal – he’s the high priest of death, turning meals into sacraments.
Take Michael Corleone. The Godfather isn’t about organized crime. It’s about a man who enters a labyrinth (the mafia) to kill a monster (Sollozzo, Barzini), only to become the Minotaur himself. His weapon isn’t a gun. It’s duty. Wedding vows. Paternal guilt. Coppola spices every scene with mythic echoes:
Baptismal water mingling with blood in the climactic montage.
Wedding rings traded for a lifetime of midnight funerals.
The slow erosion of Michael’s reflection in mirrors, as if his soul were sanded away.
The lesson? Don’t give your killer a knife. Give them a ritual. A relic. A reason the gods would nod and say, “Ah, yes. I know this one.”
In early drafts of my arson story, my firestarter torched buildings for generic thrills. Now I’m rewriting him as Hephaestus with anger issues: a firekeeper of sorts whose daughter died in a factory fire he couldn’t prove was corporate negligence. Now he burns buildings owned by that company’s subsidiaries, using her favorite pink lighter. Each blaze a letter to the daughter he failed. The police are wondering if the arsonist is a monster. Me? I’m not so sure.
Silent Screams: The Lies Dialogue Tells
There’s a reason Hemingway’s iceberg theory works for crime fiction. What’s unsaid lingers like gunpowder.
Take Huckleberry Finn. Twain doesn’t have Huck stand on a soapbox ranting about slavery. Instead, Huck tears up a letter condemning Jim to capture and mutters, “Alright then, I’ll go to hell.” That line punches harder than any monologue. Twain’s thesis? Goodness doesn’t come from Sunday sermons. It crawls out of the mud when hypocrisy burns down.
Crime fiction thrives on quiet rebellion. In the first season of True Detective, Rust Cohle spends half the series spouting nihilistic philosophy. But the real theme isn’t in his words—it’s in Marty Hart’s silence. The way he stares at Rust like a man watching a car crash. The horror isn’t the Carcosa cult. It’s Rust’s rants fading into nothing, swallowed by a world that stopped listening.
Here’s my thematic take on that: Scrap 30% of the hero’s and villain’s dialogue, and replace it with physical acts that advance the subtext.
My arsonist doesn’t monologue. He leaves burnt sketches at crime scenes—crude crayon drawings his daughter made. No speech needed. The flames do the talking.
Winning the Battle, Losing the War
Every myth is a warning: Surviving the monster is easy. Surviving yourself is the harder trick.
The Greeks called it "hubris." Every myth was intended as a warning: the monster isn’t the enemy. The real fight is surviving what the labyrinth does to you.
Breaking Bad’s Walter White doesn’t die from cancer or a cartel hit. He dies winning. His empire built. His family "protected." But the victory tastes like ashes because the labyrinth changed him. The Minotaur wasn’t Gus Fring. It was the man in the mirror.
This is where themes dig in. The detective solves the case—but stains their soul in the process.
In an earlier draft, my arson story ended with a fiery standoff. Heroic speech. It was flat. Now? Now I’m thinking of ending it this way: the detective saves the firestarter from a burning building, only to realize he wants to die there. His final act? Pressing his daughter’s lighter into the detective’s hand. The detective pockets it. When she gets home, she finds her son playing with matches. The lighter’s gone.
No tidy bows. Just the embers of a choice she’ll regret.
The Morrigan’s Bargain
But you needn’t stick to Olympus for mythological inspiration for theme. Celtic lore offers its own ghosts, like the Morrigan, a shapeshifting goddess who whispers that violence and mercy are two sides of the same bloodied coin. The Morrigan is a goddess of war, fate, and terrible choices. She doesn’t demand worship. She demands sacrifice disguised as survival.
The writer’s serial killer isn’t Celtic? No problem. Dissect their motive like a Druid reading autumnal equinox entrails. A killer harvesting organs? Seen it before. But what if they only take hearts, believing they’re weighing souls like the Morrigan? What if each victim wears a crow feather, a silent offering to the trickster? The killer is sparing the donors from worse fates, echoing the Morrigan’s role as death’s compassionate executioner.
Suddenly, routine gore becomes a ritual. The killer isn’t evil—they’re a priest in a bloodstained cassock, torn between duty and damnation. But the Morrigan isn’t done with you yet. She’s the itch in the next draft of the story, the shadow in the outline – the goddess who knows that the best crimes are prayers in disguise.
History’s Ghosts in the Machine
Themes shouldn’t be philosophy lectures. They’re stolen artifacts—old gods repurposed for new wars. Orwell knew this. 1984 isn’t original. It’s Panopticon theory dressed in dystopian drag. Big Brother works because he’s not a villain. He’s a mirror. And what’s scarier than realizing we’re complicit in our own cages?
Good crime writers steal history like art thieves.
Got an MLM scheme bankrupting a town? That’s Greek myth’s King Midas draining his kingdom’s gold.
Pharma execs burying overdose data? The Epic of Gilgamesh in lab coats, hoarding immortality only to discover that death is part of the bargain of life.
In my story, the firestarter’s enemy isn’t The Man. It’s a Moloch Corporation—a fictional conglomerate that owns everything. The deeper the investigator digs, the more Moloch’s logo appears: the equivalent of a golden calf with hollow eyes. It isn’t explained because it isn’t necessary.
The Coroner’s Edit: Cutting Deep Enough to Bleed
Often, too often, I’m finding that rewrites aren’t about polishing sentences. They’re autopsies. My job during the rewrite? Find the theme’s pulse and shock it back to life.
Here’s how Hemingway might approach it:
Write drunk (metaphorically - although Hemingway meant it more literally).
Delete every third line and the last paragraph of every story (literally).
Replace explanations with acts of violence.
Twain took this further. When critics called Huck Finn "coarse," he hacked out the moralizing scenes. Left Huck feral. Unreformed. Why? To prove his thesis: "Civilization doesn’t cure cruelty. It institutionalizes it."
Your turn. Take the scene you love most in a book or movie and ask yourself if the scene could have been done if the characters said nothing.
In The Gentleman follow-up story, my killer’s weapon isn’t an ice pick. It’s his dead wife’s oyster knife from their dating days. He doesn’t rant about loss. He shucks oysters at the docks between kills, feeding stray cats. The cats follow him. The detective character notices. I’m hoping that readers connect dots that aren’t drawn.
Final Strike: Arson as Argument
Last week, I burned (metaphorically) 12k words of that arson draft. Not because the prose failed. Because it argued nothing. The fire lacked a why. Now, in the newest version I’m working on, the detective’s son starts sleepwalking. Drawn to candles. Drawing bonfires in crayon.
Theme isn’t what the story says. It’s what the reader can’t shake after the fire dies. The lighter in their pocket. The smell of smoke in their hair. The dread that tomorrow, their own kid might ask for a match.
One Last Spark:
When you read a story or watch a movie, look for the character having a wound that won’t heal. A buried relic that the character’s been trying to bury for years.