Bingo: Purple
You do not feel the same love that everyone else does. Yours is muted, damp, not bursting or breaking. But there is a place for you, in the category of personhood”
Danya Kukafa’s Notes on an Execution is an incredible read and proof that you can write a novel about a serial killer where nothing is gratuitous, the characterization is complex, and the plot is full of nuances that lend depth to the work.
The book opens with Ansel, a serial killer who is on death row and has only hours to live. The chapters alternate between Ansel, as the time ticks down, and other characters that connect to his story. It starts with his mother Lavender, who to escape a husband who is abusing her and starting to abuse Ansel, lures her husband out of the house, leaving the boys behind. She escapes her husband and calls 911 to have her boys picked up and, she hopes, transferred to a safer home.
Chapters feature other characters, such as a girl Ansel terrorizes at a group foster home who later grows up to be the police investigator assigned to his murder case and the twin sister of the woman who ends up marrying Ansel. Ansel’s chapters feature the present countdown to his death, as well as going back in time to follow his story. The other chapters go back as far as 1973 and follow a linear progression to the present day.
The character work is extraordinary. A major theme of the book is the good and bad that each of us contain, and how our choices map to a multiplicity of lives that could have been lived. The main characters follow this theme, where their good and darker sides are on full display. Ansel in particular is a complex character. He is undoubtedly a sociopath and a murderer, simultaneously pathetic and charismatic, whose rage at being rejected or laughed at manifests in terrible crimes (for once, murder only, no sexual assault component–increasingly rare in these types of books, and something for which I was grateful). But there is more as we dig deeper, and by the end he is a kaleidoscope of motivations and feelings.The dead victims are given their due, not so much a recounting of their past, but the police investigator gives them imagined futures as she works the case, shaping stories of what they could have been if they had lived.
This book isn’t about who the killer is; it’s about the lives he affects and the depths of his personality. There is plenty of tension to keep the book moving and the ending is incredibly strong. This is no salacious story, but a story about justice, redemption, loss, and the choices we make. Highly recommended.