Notes on an Execution

by Danya Kukafka

You lift your thumb to the light, examine it close. In that same fingerprint, it is inarguable and insistent: the faint, mouse-like tick of your own pulse.

When I first started writing this novel, Ansel's perspective was written in the third person. "He lifts his thumb to the light, examines it close." I asked myself a lot of questions about why we love serial killers so much, what interests us about them. I suspect we are curious how their minds work because we want to know how people become evil. Of course, I don't have an answer to this question, but I decided to switch to second person to bring the reader closer to Ansel's mind: you are the serial killer. It's a challenging concept, of course, but that made writing this novel so much more interesting for me!