I think we have an unhealthy obsession with true crime. There is a plethora of true crime podcasts to listen to, and Ryan Murphy keeps churning out one true crime miniseries after another on Netflix. A recent series of Murphy’s, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, is about the serial killer who killed at least seventeen men between the years 1978 and 1991. Evan Peters played Jeffrey Dahmer and there was some online chatter about how empathetic he portrayed Dahmer, which led to some viewers developing a crush on him as he portrayed a serial killer. The family members of Dahmer’s victims said they were not consulted about the series. They have had old wounds ripped open and watched their lives turned into entertainment without their permission. But nobody cares what the people who survive monsters like Dahmer think, so long as they can produce content to satiate the public’s thirst for these “intriguing” men who commit murder. Danya Kukafka subverts this disturbing mania for serial killers in her thought-provoking novel Notes on an Execution, where the serial killer’s life is told through the perspective of the women in his life, revealing that there is nothing intriguing about serial killers after all.

Notes on an Execution opens in 2019 on the day Ansel Packer is set to be executed. The novel then jumps back and forth through time as the reader learns how Ansel came to spend the last seven years of his life on death row. We learn about his early childhood through his mother, Lavender, an impressionable teenage mother in 1973 who falls in love with a handsome, charming man a few years older than her who turns out to be manipulative and abusive. When Ansel is four years old, Lavender gives birth to his baby brother, and finally has the courage to leave her abusive partner – and her children.

It is through Saffy’s eyes that we first learn about Ansel’s disturbing behaviour. Saffy is a twelve-year-old orphan when we first meet her, living in the same foster group home as an eleven-year-old Ansel. Ansel is the handsome boy who all the girls have a crush on. Saffy discovers he has a penchant for killing animals, but she cannot help that thrilling feeling of being attracted to a dangerous, bad boy, even though she loathes herself for feeling that way. Saffy grows up to become a detective and is the first to suspect Ansel of being a serial killer, although police politics prevents her from being able to do anything about it.

Hazel is another woman in Ansel’s life that finds herself attracted to him, even though she knows it is wrong. Ansel is married to her twin sister, Jenny, and she stands by helplessly while Ansel becomes the kind of man that his father was and controls Jenny’s life.

And what do we learn from Ansel himself as he counts down the last hours of his life? That he thinks he is cleverer than everyone else, although he is not. That he could have stopped himself from committing murder, but he chose not to. So why the fascination with men like Ansel, or Dahmer or Bundy or Manson? Because they are handsome and charming, and as a society we are conditioned to be attracted to physically pleasing people to the point of ignoring their immorality. Notes on an Execution wades beyond the shallowness of the serial killer and instead celebrates his victims and their lives that should have been.