How Violence Ripples Across Generations in Notes on an Execution

The Thematic Claim: Violence as Inheritance and Contagion

The central claim of Notes on an Execution is that violence is never a contained event. It radiates outward from the moment of harm, reshaping the lives of mothers, sisters, detectives, and entire communities for decades. The novel deliberately refuses the conventional serial-killer narrative—the one that centers the perpetrator's psychology and charisma—and instead trains its attention on the women who must live with the aftermath. As the author explains in her own afterword, the story belongs to Lavender, Hazel, and Saffy, the women irrevocably changed by Ansel Packer's actions. The killer's story is not the only one that matters; in fact, the novel insists, it may be the least important one.

The Origin Point: Lavender and the Locket

The novel traces the ripple effect back to its source in 1973, when seventeen-year-old Lavender gives birth to Ansel in a barn. The violence she endures at Johnny Packer's hands—the locked food, the bruises, the coerced sex—is the soil in which Ansel's own violence will eventually take root. When Johnny slams Ansel's head into a doorframe and locks away all food, Lavender's helplessness becomes a kind of inheritance. She cannot drive, cannot escape, cannot protect her son from the man who controls them both.

The locket is the novel's most potent symbol of this inheritance. Lavender's mother's locket, the only thing she owns for herself, is threaded around Ansel's neck on a night of hunger and fear. The gesture is an act of love, but it is also an act of transmission—the locket carries Lavender's own history of loss and abandonment into her son's life. Years later, Ansel will give Jenny Fisk a ring connected to the same jewelry, linking the women he kills to the mother who could not save him. The locket becomes a thread connecting generations of violence, transforming from a token of maternal protection into evidence of murder.

The Ripple to the Victims: The Elsewhere Chapter

The novel's most devastating articulation of the ripple effect comes in the chapter titled Elsewhere, which imagines the futures that were stolen. Izzy Sanchez would have been remembered for her sunburned shoulders and the taste of oranges; Angela Meyer would have traveled to twenty-seven countries; Lila's third child would have been a girl named Grace; Jenny Fisk would have delivered thousands of newborns as a nurse. The chapter insists that these women were not merely victims—they were people with lives, desires, and futures that the killer consumed along with their bodies.

The tragedy, the chapter makes clear, is not only that these women died, but that they now exist in memory primarily as a summation of that awful second. The killer has eaten up their other moments one by one, reducing complex human beings to footnotes in a killer's story. This is the ripple effect at its most insidious: violence doesn't just end lives, it retroactively erases them. The novel's formal choice—devoting an entire chapter to these imagined futures—is a corrective, an attempt to give the victims what they never got in life: a voice.

The Ripple to the Survivors: Hazel and Saffy

The ripple extends to those who loved the victims. Hazel Fisk, Jenny's twin sister, appears in Saffy's life carrying the evidence that will finally connect Ansel to the murders. Hazel is described as the shadow imprint of her sister, warped in grief—a living reminder that violence doesn't end with the victim's death. She carries the ring Ansel gave Jenny, the same ring connected to the locket Lavender gave her son. The object that was meant to keep Ansel safe has become the instrument of his undoing.

Saffy Singh, the detective who hunts Ansel for years, embodies a different kind of ripple: the moral contamination of the investigator. Saffy knew what Ansel was capable of—she watched Jenny put on lipstick in the rearview, unload shopping bags from the trunk—and did nothing but observe. Her guilt is compounded by a terrible what-if: what if her pursuit of Ansel, her decision to follow him, her intervention at the Blue House, actually made him into the monster she needed him to be? The novel refuses to let Saffy off the hook. She has not saved anyone, and she knows it.

The Ripple to the Next Generation: Blue and Lavender

The novel's final movement brings the ripple full circle. In 2019, Lavender—now an old woman living in a community of survivors—travels to the Blue House to meet Blue Harrison, the granddaughter of the man who once gave Ansel shelter. Blue is the living proof that violence does not have to be the only inheritance. She is the first peep of green after a long gray winter, a young woman with her own apartment, her own job, her own volunteer work. Lavender's awe at Blue's existence—her recognition that she made this person—is the novel's most hopeful note.

But the reunion is also a confrontation. Blue tells Lavender about Ansel's time at the Blue House, about how easy it was to be with him, how he was happy to be there. The revelation that Ansel was capable of warmth and connection—that he could feel almost like a father figure to Blue—complicates any simple reading of him as a monster. Lavender cannot picture the little boy she knew doing the things Blue describes. The man who grew from her child feels as distant as the cucumbers she planted last summer and failed to bring to fruit.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel is careful not to offer a simple causal chain from Lavender's suffering to Ansel's violence. Ansel himself insists that his acts were not a thought process, or a thing that curved in any traceable way. He describes a screaming in his head, an urgent need for quiet, that connects to his childhood helplessness but does not excuse his choices. The novel holds two truths simultaneously: Ansel's violence has roots in his own trauma, and that trauma does not diminish his responsibility for what he did.

The novel also complicates the idea that violence is purely inherited. Saffy's story introduces institutional violence—the superintendent who dismisses her as a diversity initiative, the bureaucratic machinery that grinds on regardless of whether justice is served. The system that is supposed to contain violence produces its own forms of harm. And the novel's own structure, which gives Ansel a voice even as it centers the women around him, acknowledges the seductive pull of the serial-killer narrative even as it resists it. The theory notebooks that Ansel keeps represent his attempt to understand his own violence, but they also reveal the limits of that understanding—he can catalog his impulses but cannot explain them.

Study Questions

1. How does the locket function as a symbol of intergenerational transmission? The locket passes from Lavender's mother to Lavender to Ansel, and later connects to the ring Ansel gives Jenny. It carries love and protection, but also becomes evidence of violence. Trace its journey through the novel and consider what it means that the object meant to keep Ansel safe becomes the instrument of his conviction.

2. Why does the novel include the Elsewhere chapter, and what does it accomplish? The chapter imagines the futures of Izzy, Angela, Lila, and Jenny—futures that were stolen. It insists that victims are more than their deaths, and it challenges the reader to see them as full human beings rather than footnotes in a killer's story. How does this chapter reshape your understanding of the novel's central concern?

3. How does Saffy's guilt complicate the novel's treatment of justice? Saffy knew what Ansel was capable of and did nothing. She wonders if her pursuit of him made him into the monster she needed him to be. The novel suggests that the detective is not innocent, and that the justice system's machinery can produce its own forms of harm. What does this mean for the possibility of justice?

4. What does Blue's reunion with Lavender suggest about the possibility of breaking the cycle? Blue represents a third generation that has not been defined by violence. Her existence—her apartment, her job, her volunteer work—is evidence that the ripple can be interrupted. But the reunion also forces Lavender to confront what her son became, suggesting that healing and grief can coexist.

5. How does the novel resist the serial-killer narrative even as it gives Ansel a voice? The novel centers the women affected by Ansel's violence—Lavender, Hazel, Saffy, Blue—while still allowing Ansel to speak. It acknowledges the seductive pull of the killer's story while insisting that it is not the only story that matters. Consider how the structure of the novel, alternating between Ansel's countdown and the women's stories, enacts this resistance.