Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka was chosen by a fellow Spooky Book Club member, but I wasn’t sure what to think going in. Recently, when a member has chosen a book, it has been less spooky, definitely not horror, sort of something leaning more toward “that’s a little bit dark.” Therefore, with Kukafka’s book, I had no expectations going in, nor did I read the synopsis. I am, after all, the host for the club, so I read everything regardless. Even more intriguing is the person who chose the book reads everything in the horror genre. I mean, I can’t keep up with them, or even pretend to.

Kukafka’s book is (surprise!) the hours that leads up to an execution of a prisoner named Ansel Packer in an American jail. The countdown is literally on, with Ansel’s chapters titled how much time remains. At first, I thought this was a female serial killer because of the style of writing, which led me to looking up who the author is—she’s an American woman. Therefore, my first impression of Ansel was a bit wavery due to this disconnect in the way he thinks, the flowery nature of his phrasing. Here’s an example, and let me know if you agree: “You have known, of course, that this moment would arrive, but you did not expect it to feel so trivial, just another second blending with the millions that make up your insignificant little life.”

However, interspersed between Ansel’s chapters are those from the perspective of women he knew, starting with his mother, Lavender. Lavender’s first chapter was my favorite; we intimately observe Ansel’s mother run off with a young man when she is quite young, live in the young man’s farm house (no other adults are there, as they have all passed away), give birth to two children in the barn, and slowly crumple under the weight of her partner’s insidious domestic abuse. Typically, the abuse isn’t physical; instead, he doesn’t let her leave the house for years (they are ten miles from the closest neighbors) and tells her and the toddler and infant that they must earn food, putting padlocks on the cabinets and fridge.

There are other women we meeting, including Hazel, the sister of Ansel’s wife. And there is the mysterious Blue, which I won’t give away. Another woman is Saffy, short for Saffron (what’s with the names??), who meets Ansel when they are children, and he scares her when she sees him messing around with dead animals in the woods. She later becomes a police officer, and we start to see some of the pieces coming together. While her work is an obsession, Saffy doesn’t feel much relief at the conclusion of a case: “She wonders how a concept like justice made it into the human psyche, how she ever believed that something so abstract could be labeled, meted out. Justice does not feel like compensation. It does not even feel like satisfaction.” The author is saying something about justice for women harmed by men, of course.

Overall, I found the novel compelling. The more I got to know Ansel, the more I realized he was a mediocre white dude who simply believed he had Great Thoughts, all of which he shared in notebooks where he wrote about his Theory — there could be alternate timelines. Like, what if we made choice A in real life, but out there, somewhere, is a version of you that chose B living a totally different life. Wow. So deep. Like philosophy 101 deep.

But between Ansel’s chapter were those glorious women with deep thoughts, feelings, and remarkable experiences. That’s sort of the point. At the end of the novel, the author explains that she wrote Notes on an Execution because she was tired of all the fame male serial killers received while their victims are forgotten—faceless, nameless. And this is the part that irks me. Why write a book about a serial killer’s impending execution and include him at all if the point is to focus on the women around the killer who were affected by him? I felt like Ansel’s chapters were the heartbeat of the book while the women were the blood that travelled his veins.

I do want to emphasize that the girls Ansel murders are NOT murdered on page, and I believe this is done intentionally to avoid glorifying what serial killers do (and the author notes that one famous serial killer is getting yet another documentary on Netflix). There is one scene in which Ansel’s father hits his mother, but in general, Notes on an Execution is more about how violence affects people in a ripple. I would recommend this book to any of my readers.

Books of Fall 🍂🎃🍵

• Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Just Desserts by G.A. McKevett
• Slewfoot by Brom
• She Throws Herself Forward to Stop the Fall by Dave Newman
• Submerged by Hillel Levin
• The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson
• Homing by Sherrie Flick (DNF)
• The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (DNF)
• Ask Elizabeth: Real Answers to Everything You Secretly Wanted to Ask about Love, Friends, Your Body — and Life in General by Elizabeth Berkley (DNF)
• No Good Deed by Allison Brennan (#10)
• Fat!So? by Marilyn Wann
• The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (DNF)
• Quest for the Unknown: Bizarre Phenomena by Reader’s Digest (DNF)
• Icebreaker by Hannah Grace (DNF)
• Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
• A Life in Letters by Zora Neale Hurston
• Bitter Thirst by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs #8)
• Deaf Eyes on Interpreting, edited by Thomas H. Holcomb and David H. Smith
• Compassion, Michigan by Raymond Luczak
• Syd Arthur by Ellen Frankel