Bayou Pages | “Notes on an Execution”by Danya Kukafka

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside – some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part.”

Danya Kukafka’s new novel explores the media-saturated, voyeuristic world of serial killers – the cultural fascination of seemingly every new documentary. But Kukafka comes in the back door, articulating the killer’s point of view hours before execution and then delving into the lives of 3 women affected by his crimes. We meet Ansel Packer pacing in his cell, awaiting transport to his death by lethal injection. In letting us into the killer’s head, Kukafka forces readers to sit with a psychopath, to contemplate his world as he sees it.

We uncover Ansel’s childhood from the three other primary characters. Lavender, Ansel’s mother, abandoned him in an attempt to save Ansel and his brother from an abusive stepfather. Years later, she seeks to find her long-lost son and heal the damage she caused. Saffron, the police chief hunting for Ansel, spent time with him in foster care, knows his history with harming animals, and suspects his crimes before having evidence. And Hazel, the twin sister of Ansel’s wife Jenny, is both attracted to her brother-in-law and fearful of his absence of emotion. In articulating the wide ranging effects of one man’s crimes, Kukafka tries to excavate the brutality of unresolved trauma and the failures of the criminal justice system. 

Reading this novel, I kept picturing Susan Sarandon walking along the prison cells in the movie Dead Man Walking – a film that again asks us to reckon with the judicial theology of killing the killers. But here with Ansel, we have a man deserving of capital punishment, as dictated by the law, and yet Kukafka forces us to reckon with what capital punishment means and whom it serves. I won’t ruin the ending, as this book should be felt as much as read. And Kukafka forces readers to sit with the experience from all angles – what it may feel like to be a psychopath absent of any regret; what it feels like to be impacted by the whims of a killer; what it feels like to learn your son is a killer. Kukafka expands the headlines beyond the serial killer’s name and examines the story, not just of the crime, but what society does (and doesn’t do) to prevent and rectify their happening.

I read this book quickly and with one eye closed. Kukafka’s writing is crisp, poignant, and thought-provoking. She is also the writer of the bestselling novel Girl in Snow.  

“There is good and there is evil, and the contradiction lives in everyone. The good is simply the stuff worth remembering. The good is the point of it all.”