Bookwild - Danya Kukafka: Notes on an Execution

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

On this episode, I talk to Danya Kukafka about her stunning new novel Notes on an Execution.You can also watch the episode on YouTubeAuthor LinksInstagramGoodreadsWebsiteCheck out the book hereNotes on an Execution SynopsisAnsel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake. Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men. Get Bookwild MerchCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackCheck Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck out the Imposter Hour Podcast with Liz and GregFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrian 

Hi, my name is Kate and I love to read. Like, I was carrying books around with me before Kindles were a thing. So I decided to start a podcast where I interview the authors of some of my favorite books, ask them all of my questions so that I can read between the lines of the books. Welcome back to another episode of Between the Lines. I'm here today with Danya Kukovka, who is the author of Notes on an Execution. a fantastic book that I got to read this month. So thank you for being on the podcast, Donya. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah. So before we get into the book, I did want to get to know a little bit more about you. So we'll kind of dive into that

first. When did you know that you wanted to be an author or when did you know that you had a story you wanted to write? Oh, a very, very young age. I started writing. I wrote my first book when I was eight, I believe I was in the third grade. And do you remember the TV show Reading Rainbow? Of course I do. Yeah. Yes. So they had a kid's writing contest. And so I entered it. I wrote a picture book. I illustrated it. It was about 12 fairies named Carla and the 13th named Carlina, who was a total weirdo. And I love it. I illustrated the whole thing. And my mom had it like bound up and I didn't know win the contest and I was devastated. But, you know, that was just a good little intro to the realities of the publishing world.

True. Yeah. And then I also actually, fun fact, I wrote three novels when I was in high school. And, yeah, and, you know, I went through the process of trying to find an agent and went through the process of trying to publish them and I can only thank God that they're not published at this point. It's actually such a relief that they're not in the world. I'm very happy about that.

And then I wrote my first book, Girl in Snow, was technically actually my fourth novel that I'd finished. That's so cool. I had somewhat of a similar experience. I do remember the Reading Rainbow Challenge for sure. But then my third grade teacher actually did that whole process with us where we, like, wrote a book and illustrated it. And then you, like, send it off and it gets bound and everything.

So I was just, like, transported back to my childhood there for a second. It's such a like formative experience, I feel like, to like recognize and write a book, you just have to put out the content and then it's there, right? Publishing is another story, but to actually get the book onto the page is the whole process. And to realize that it's such a young age, yeah, it's funny. That is so cool. So how has your writing process developed in all of this writing that you've done? What's your writing process like?

It's changed so much over the years. And especially, I think it's changed most between my first book and my second book. So my first book, Girl in Snow, I wrote from the ages of 19 to 24. Wow. And that I wrote while I was in college. I wrote it in writing classes in undergrad. I wrote it while I was waitressing full-time, like 80 hours a week in a cabin in the Anderondacks. I wrote it while I was working my first full-time publishing job.

And by the time it came out, that was my only experience of writing, was writing in the Little March to do everything else. Yeah. And for my second book, I really wanted to change that. So I left my publishing job. I left New York. I moved out to Seattle where I live now. And I decided to write full time. And it turned out, I'm very glad that I did it because I think it was a really important experience to know what it felt like. But I was so miserable. I, there was like nothing as terrifying as waking up first thing in the morning and like looking at the ceiling and being like, okay, all you have to do today is like write a really good book, which I felt like, yeah, I felt like that was just like beyond

existentially stressful. So I've now found a nice halfway where I still get to work in publishing or work as a literary agent. And I also get to write. So I feel like it actually has come together kind of beautifully in the last two years or so where I'm able to write for an hour every morning before work. And then I am actually next weekend taking my first weekend away to write, which I've never done before. So I'm, if you couldn't tell them, like, pretty extroverted, I'm really not one for solitude. So I think it'll be interesting. I'm bringing my dog, so that'll help. You have that friend with you then. That's nice. I feel like the whole, like the most romantic idea of authors is the like going away and writing somewhere. Yeah. I couldn't believe I'd never

done it before, but I'd never really had the need for it before. And now I'm like out of point where I know exactly what I need to do for my next step in my manuscript process. And I'm, and I just need the time to do it. So I was like, okay, well, it's time. Yeah, that makes sense. So you're figuring out, like, what really works for you. How do you create your characters? Do you, like, really try to get to know them before you start writing, or do you kind of get to know them while you're writing? Definitely while I'm writing. I think I always think of it as, like, meeting new people, right? The more time you spend with them, the better you know them. The more questions you ask them, the longer you talk to them, the better you know them. Yeah. And for each of my books, each of my books has taken at least five years to write so far.

And that's a long time to sit with a group of characters. And I found that that has become extremely as it takes me all those years. And as I every day sort of sit down for an hour with one of them or each of them or whatever it is. Yeah, there are some very fleshed out characters in this book. So that makes a lot of sense to me. You did say that you are, yeah, that you currently are. are a literary agent. So how has that affected how you write or has it? You know, I think it's more affected my like day-to-day schedule more than anything else. But like I mentioned, it's in a good way. I'm always interacting with writers. I'm always reading. The only bad thing is that I do not really read for fun anymore. I listen to books on audio for fun, but you know, I'm constantly

constantly constantly for work. So that's the only way that it has affected my writing in it that way. Like, I'm rarely reading published books. But I think for the most part, like having my brain sort of immersed constantly in the written word is just flexing a muscle all the time. And I love that. I do wish that being an agent would, like,

give me some magical knowledge into the marketplace that would help me write books that, like, blow up into huge bestsellers. But at the end of the day, you can only write what you feel like writing. And, you know, sort of market, market be damned you can't really you can't predict it because books take so long too that like you know by the time my next book comes out it's going to be a different market four years from now I least and the market's going to be totally different I can't predict what that's going to look like yeah yeah I wish it was more helpful I wondered I was either one of those things where it does

help or it's just like yeah I help other people kind of do the stuff that I do it's exactly what it is yeah I help guide other people through the process that I've been through that's so Cool. So how would you describe notes on an execution in a couple sentences? Yeah, I always say notes on an execution is a novel about a serial killer that's actually not about him at all. It's about the women in his life who are shaped and formed by his violence over his span of many years. I like to say, you know, it's not a book for the serial killer. It's not a book for the victims. It's a book for the women who survive. And for me, that sort of sums it all up. And structurally, of course, it opens on our series.

killer Ansel Packer, who's in prison, awaiting his execution. He has 12 hours. The novel counts down the 12 hours. And in between each hour, you get part of his life story told from these women who are forever changed by his choices. Yes. That is a perfect description without giving anything away. What prompted you to write it? You know, I spent so many years watching network crime TV, which I love. Like, I love CSI. Law &RESPie is my favorite. Criminal Minds.

You know, all those shows that aired for so many years, and some of them are still airing. And they really follow this repetitive narrative of, right? Like, you open on the dead white girl, the detective hunts down the killer, the detective puts the killer in prison, and all is good. And I found, I had had a hunch for many years

that there's something deeper underneath this. story, right? There's some undercurrent running beneath it that needs to be looked at. And that was what prompted me to write this book with my own fascination with crime and with serial killers and the question of why that existed in popular culture. Yeah, we definitely have gotten a little bit obsessed with serial killers, like documentaries or TV shows that are fictional. So we are going to jump into the spoiler section now. So if you have not... I can say anything I want. Yes. Yeah. Okay, great.

Yeah, so I just always tell people that if they haven't read it to just stop and go read it and then come back. But if they're here because they've already read it, then obviously they can just keep listening. So you did kind of mention how it is a book about a serial killer, but it's also not about him. And so it really, the majority of the book is told through the perspectives of these other women that survived being around him. what prompted you to like think of the idea of kind of taking the power away from him and not letting him tell his story? Yeah, you know, initially I didn't have that idea. That was not how this book started. It evolved for a period of many years. People always ask me like, you know, do you have a whole drawer of books that you threw away? And I'm like, yes, but they're all the same book and they're all leading to this book. Right? So ideas I never really throw away. I just change them and evolve them as time goes on. And the first idea I had for this book, I actually wrote the first draft quite quickly, and it was told from Ansel's entire life from his perspective in the third person.

And then the other half of it was told from a character that's not even in there really anymore named Blue. And Blue had this whole backstory. She had like a love triangle going on in her high school. She had a younger brother who ended up being murdered by Ansel, which obviously is no longer a part of the book at all. but I found that there were a lot of problems with that manuscript, one of them being that it was kind of glorifying this idea of the serial killer, right? And I talked to my agent about it and she kept just saying, well, what about the women? Like, what about his mom? Like, what about them? What about the women? And I kept thinking, what about the women? And that was when it really clicked

and became a much more interesting story. That is so fascinating because it's like such a hallmark of the book now. And they kind of think that you work together. It's so fun. Work to get there is really cool. Yeah, yeah, and it didn't start that way. It rarely does. I'm always fascinated by how people get to sometimes like the most important part of the book. They're like, yeah, I didn't even know when I started. I'm like, that is so cool. So you mentioned like in that first one, you have him and third person, kind of that first draft that you wrote. And then in the in the published version, the person that everyone has read, Lavender, Hazel and Safi are the main women telling the story and they're in third person, but Ansel's part is told in second person.

And so was that another choice to kind of like take power from him as well? Yeah, that came pretty late in the process, actually. So I had been drafting all these women. I'd been drafting Ansel for, you know, probably a year and a half before I reached that in person conclusion. He'd been in the third person still. And it felt very flat to me and kind of dead. and I was actually watching yet another Ted Bundy documentary.

There's like millions of them out there. And I had this moment where I was thinking, you know, why do we watch? Why are there so many Ted Bundy documentaries? Like, why do we care so much? Why are we watching this man, you know, 30 years after his death? We're still obsessed with him. Why? And part of me wondered if it was a desire to really get in his head.

If it was a desire to understand what was happening inside his specific brain. And that led me to the you. Placing the reader directly in the second person, placing the reader directly inside the serial killer's body, like you are a fingerprint, you are sitting in yourself, you have 12 hours left to live. And some people, it's really interesting, I've actually had about a 50-50 response from readers in that some people felt that that was really intimate and uncomfortable because it was so intimate and other people felt it was really distancing.

So, yeah, I'm curious where you landed on that. How did you feel about the second person? The only thing that I noticed is it's basically where I thought you were going to be headed with it is so rarely is stuff written in that perspective. So mainly it was just like such a different experience for me. I can't I can't really tell if it felt more or less intimate to me or not though. It was just like I would just like adjust when we switched chapters basically. Right. Right.

And it's interesting. I've had a lot of readers say, you know, I don't, I usually can't read anything in the second person. but I think since these are such a small snippets and actually takes up a very small percentage of the book. Yeah, and so it did just make it like very clear that it was like a different chapter. So that kind of was interesting too. So lavender, hazel, saffron, and Jenny are the main female characters in the book. And Jenny is the only one who wasn't associated with like a color or a plant. I mean color because of hazel basically.

but was there a reason that you gave her a more common name? Yeah, well, not really. So Jenny, Jenny was always Jenny. Like from the very, very earliest dress, Jenny was always Jenny, before Hazel ever existed. So there came a point where I gave her a sister. And initially that sister's name was Rosie and she was a younger sister. And she was written in the first. Okay.

And over time, I realized that Lavender, Saffy and Hazel were going to be the narrating perspectives. I realized I was very, very attached to the name's lavender and saffy, realizing they're both colors and in both plants. I was like, Hazel's got to be one, too, since she's also a narrating perspective. So that was really just kind of the like balance reason for me. But yeah, Jenny's name for me, it just couldn't change. It had always been changing.

That's interesting. So it kind of like was on purpose, but Jenny's wasn't necessarily. So the book also really explores the theme of like the overwhelming amount of emotions that you have in motherhood, like how it can make you so happy. And it can also feel like it's like breaking your heart even when the good things are happening. So did you know going into the book that you were going to really like study motherhood so much? You know, I'm not, I'm not a parent. I do not have kids. but I've always been intrigued specifically by the concept of the killer's mother.

And I think this is a figure that throughout our culture for so many years, we have villainized so heavily, right? Especially, one instance where I've really given this a lot of thought is school shooters and their mothers. And those, I find those moments and those interviews and when they're covered in the news just so devastating for so many reasons. And bringing that concept to a serial killer, I found was a way to look at survival, right? Survival, what it means to take responsibility for something, what it means to not take responsibility for something. And, yeah, Lavender for me was definitely my favorite character in my most. Yeah, her character, there's just so many feelings. And she spans, like, the entire book as well.

so do spend a lot of time with her. And it's also like really, the book also really explores like what actual love is. And so in some ways, Jenny loved Ansel because she did end up being with him. And at the end, Safi kind of starts to realize that maybe her obsession with Ansel was a kind of love. Because she kind of thinks back to her mother's words. her mom said to her, the right kind of love will eat you alive. So do you feel like they both actually loved him? Or do you think that they kind of had a distorted view on love because of like their experiences? Yeah, I think that's such a good question. I think for Jenny, we'll start

with Jenny. I think Jenny does love him to a certain extent. I think Jenny understands him to a certain extent. And by the time she meets him, they, like, that love has just been kind of, like, stale and lost for a lot of years. And to me, that's, uh, sort of a portrait of a modern marriage in some ways, right? Like, you grow apart also living in the same house. And I did wish that there was more room in the book for me to explore Ansela and Jenny's relationship because I'm also pretty curious about it, but it's kind of off the page. Um, and I think, for the most part, you know, there are a couple scenes in which Hazel and Jenny are talking about Jenny's marriage to Ansel and, and Jenny is saying, like, you know, he was, he was never bad to me. He really

wasn't, which is really interesting, of course, because then he kills her. Um, right. I think, um, I think Jenny does love him. I do. And I think by the time she leads him, their marriage is just clearly over for her. Um, yeah, Safi's a little more complicated. I don't think Safi loves him. I think Safi loves the idea of taking down. I think Safi loves the idea of the thrill and the rush that comes with, that's often associated with bad men, right, with danger, with violence. She's, like, intrigued by it. Like, you mentioned in your questions to me, like,

she is always drawn to chaos. She's drawn to trauma because that's what she's done. And I do think that can function as a sort of love. and when you've been obsessing over something for so many years, how else are you going to put it? I think it's got to be in a certain way in order to make it make sense to yourself. I definitely agree with that. So another core part of the book is that Ansel has this theory that he's really proud of. And the general gist of it is he thinks there's no such thing as good and evil,

but that there's only memory and choice and that we all kind of live on a spectrum, kind of between the two. And, like, in general, it's something I agree with. And then there's also, like, some people who just repeatedly keep making evil decisions over and over and over again. But it's hard to feel like they're even on a spectrum anymore. So where do you fall with Ansel's theory? Ansel's theory for me functions as a way for him to try to understand what he's done, a way for him to try to justify that he deserves to be alive.

still and a way for him to really like prove to himself and to the world that he deserves to keep living right um but he's not that smart um one of my favorite one of my favorite moments in the book is when the warden sort of interrogates the concept of his theory and he says oh so you're a manifesto guy huh um and one of the titles i considered for the book was this is not a manifesto um which i found like you know it it could have worked but it didn't really it didn't really it didn't really pull the women in and the way that I wanted. Right. But the manifesto for, or the theory for me functions is a way for Ansel to believe that he's special

and a way for him to really like intellectually tell himself that he's different before finally coming to the realization that he's not and he just made these bad choices. Yes. And Safi and Ansel are almost like, Safi contrasted against him basically, it feels like the proof that you really can still make better choices. So they both have similarly sad childhoods. They both lose their parents. They meet it basically an orphanage.

But she goes on to like get into drugs and partying and then has a moment where she's like, am I just, is my whole life going to be a basement party basically? And she makes a choice that puts her on a different trajectory. And he kind of just succumbs to kind of probably like, the anger and all the feelings that were around what his childhood was like so was staffie's story was the way she met him then the way her story was told was it kind of to like really have a side by side of the fact that choice is what can really make a difference absolutely you totally

hit the nail the head that's exactly what i was intended i throughout the book wanted to parallel them right like through in talking about this book i talk a lot about nature versus nurture um you know you can have a terrible childhood. You can have all this trauma happened. There's sort of a tendency to talk about how troubled killers are, how sad their lives were, how they couldn't help it in some ways, right? Like, they just, yeah. But, you know, Safi has all these same experiences, and she does not do people. Killing people is a choice that you make. And I, yeah, I think you, I can do something up perfectly. Yeah, cool. So Safi also reflects on Felix Culpa multiple times in the book.

So she mentions about suffering or she's kind of reflecting on it. It was the scariest thing about being a woman. It was hardwired, ageless, the part that knew you could have the good without the hurt, but it wouldn't be nearly as exquisite. So what do you feel is kind of feminine about the desire for good things that come with pain, or at least what was for her. Yeah, we've all loved a bad boy, you know. And I think there's something, I think there's something just inherently and intrinsically

like attractive to women about that in a certain way, right? Most, I like to think I'm not the kind of person who's actually going to choose that in the end. Right. But if you've grown up knowing that that is, that's what gives you the most sort of opportunity to be alive, right? all that's that you know violence and trauma and fear as a child and that's how she knows how to live and it makes sense to me that she's attracted to people who bring that out and I think I think a lot of women have this experience too with particularly with dangerous men or violent men or you know there's a whole world out there of women who write to men in prison for this exactism and I think there's

something just sort of like universally appealing to women whether or not we want to admit it about the fact of being in danger and being the one who changes that, being the one who softens a man. And yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of talking in circles. But I do think. No, I agree. I think it's what she's alluding to is like the bad boy concept, right?

Yeah. We want to hurt a little bit because then when we get what we want, it's even more satisfying. Yeah. And, you know, I made sure to give Hazel, in contrast, has like a really stable, loving. inconsistent relationship with family. And she has chosen that, right? And I don't think Hazel has any of that desire for her the same way. So, of course, not all women do, but I do think it comes alongside trauma in a lot of ways.

Yeah. It definitely seems to. The book also really explores what is real justice and is it even possible. So there's a point where it says it was in the ambitious concept, justice. The idea that your law in life could be based on your own choices. So in your opinion, is justice even possible in an imperfect world? No. I mean, I think there, especially for a crime that's like violent and the penis, it's the ones

Amsula is committed. No, I think there's no going back from that. There's no way to repair that. There's no way to ease it or put itself on it. I think it's always going to be sort of an open wound no matter what you do, which is why I think the justice system is obviously really, really flawed, and particularly the capital punishment system is really flawed. You know, the idea that you're giving something back to someone like Hazel,

someone like her mother by killing someone else is just like preposterous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It really is. Uh, in another one of Safi's, chapters, she's reflecting on stuff and on kind of on human nature. And it says 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. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting that it was good. So what do you think are the positives and negatives to like our predisposed nature to think of it? of ourselves as better than we actually are. Yeah, I love, I'm so glad we pulled that line out. I think that's one of my favorites in the book. Oh, me too. I had highlighted. You know, I've long held the theory. There are so few people in the world who wake up and think I'm going to be a bad person today. Right. Right. Like, that's not what human nature is wired for. Human nature is wired to believe that we are doing something necessary for ourselves, whether that's good, I don't know.

But, you know, I think I used to say, I used to walk around saying I didn't believe in evil, which is definitely not a valid thing that I continue to say. Yeah. But I used to walk around and say, I don't believe in evil. I think there are just people who try to reach the ends they want via terrible evil methods. And they can twist their brains into whatever they need to twist their brains into to be able to commit these acts, right? And a lot of the time it's just desire. A lot of the time it's just like wanting or or humiliation or shame or threat. But I don't think that anyone says like, I'm going to be bad.

Right. And that's why I think there is a necessity to looking at the humanity of those people at the same time. Yeah. And that's what really asks the reader to do. Yeah. I would completely agree. Something else I had highlighted that really felt it was. so poignant, especially to the entire arc of the story. And you kind of have mentioned Ansel

getting questioned on his theory. But the chaplain at the end says to him, of course you can be good. Everyone can be good. That's not the question. And it just like, it like stopped me in my tracks because I was just like, this is like completely dismantling everything Ansel has like built up to make him feel good about himself. So were you planning kind of from the beginning to have someone really like bluntly confront him at the end to just really point out like choices are what matter and that is where the good and evil comes into play yes absolutely you totally totally caught on to that i think you know i think part of that moment for me it was important to recognize that ansell sort of what he sees the execution doing is taking away the possibility of what his life could be

beyond the point that they killed him and i think that's true i think that is what the execution is doing but the chaplain is there to say that's not what matters it matters what you already did yeah um and i think that that that yeah that moment was really important for me yeah he also another thing he kind of does to defend himself or whatever is that he really believes that there are all these multiverses out there and it and it seems like it's kind of a way for him to be like well there's a better version of me out there i'm just like stuck in this bad universe version of myself but then later when saffy's kind of thinking back on the women he did kill and how like they didn't actually have lives. She's kind of like fantasizing what their lives actually would have been.

But she gets a point and she says she would forget that tempting almost world. There was only this a brief and imperfect singular reality. And do you think Staffie is better off because she's able to actually live in reality where Ansell is just like trying to even come up with other realities? Yeah, I think it's such a defense mechanism for him. And, you know, if you're going to consider other realities, right, you have to consider, and there's a point in which he considers the reality in which he doesn't kill these girls in the first place, right? In which I think he even, like, imagines stopping his car next to the first girl that he kills and helping her home and driving away instead.

And he did not choose that. And that is why Safi, that's the moment that Safi recognizes, you know, the concept of the alternate reality is interesting as like a thought, experiment, but it doesn't matter in the end. And Ansel's trying to use it as a defense mechanism, but that falls really flat for him by the end. Yeah, that is the tricky thing for me, like with anything philosophical, which is like what he was really trying to get into. Like sometimes, yes, as a thought experiment, it's interesting to think about, but it doesn't mean that it should, it could ever like hold up as a defense for someone, but some people like want to hold onto that so badly. It's all he has to hold on to, right? Um,

Like there's literally nothing else. There's no other way for him to defend himself against what he's done. And that one doesn't hold up. No, no. It does not. So one of the biggest recurring questions throughout the whole book, whether it's direct or not, is really wondering what it is about us as a culture that has gotten so fascinated with serial killers and just thinking that they're so interesting.

And so near the end it mentions there are millions of men out there. who want to hurt women, people seem to think that Ansel Parker is extraordinary because he actually did. And it's like, when you put it that way, you're like, wait, there is nothing like extraordinary about that technically. So why do you think we as a culture have grown so fascinated by this unimpressive character trait of like killing multiple people? It's not impressive at all, right? Like, what a dumb thing to be so interested in. Like, they decide they want to do something and they do it. That's it. There's nothing. There's nothing. more interesting about it. But I do think the lore around this character, and he's really a

caricature. I mean, he's not a real person generally. You have Ted Bundy, you have a couple other serial killers who sort of embody these traits that we've decided that now all serial killers have, when actually they're not particularly smart. Most of them get caught. And they just do bad things because they feel like it. And that, to me, is not a reason to revel in someone. But I think the stories around serial killers are the ones that we're trying to tell and failing to tell most of the time. And that's part of the reason I wrote this book, right? Like the sort of the pain that comes inside such unfathomably bad acts, those are the moments that I was interested in investigating. And I think those are the reasons that we, that we're interested in this in the first

place. Yeah. When you were saying that, it made me think about, like when you're saying actually a lot of them get caught, I was like, wait a second. So there could technically be people who, like, had the potential as a weird word to use to become serial killers, but they get caught in the first murder. So, like, I'd never even gotten to that point before. You were saying that. And I was like, wait a second. There could be people who just got caught the first time that they did it. And yeah, we've like basically built everything we know about like, what was the criminal minds. Like, we're like, oh, the really prolific people do it this way. And, and yeah. And, like, we've, like, And so now we all just accept that.

Right. And, you know, it's such an antiquated concept of the serial killer, too. Like, it was, it was important in the 70s, 80s to 90s, because we didn't have the technology that we have now. And that was when serial killers were really, you know, existing in the way that we know them to. But they don't. They can't do that anymore.

We have street cameras everywhere. Anybody has phones. There's like waves to track people now that there were not then. I read a really, there's a book called American Predator. It's a true crime book. It's about a serial killer who exists, I think, somewhere around 2013. That's when he's caught. And that's one of the most recent ones I've seen in which, of course, in the end, technology does sell.

And that is, of course, how he gets caught. I'm probably saying this wrong, so don't quote me on it, but I remember it has something to do with gas station. Right. Because, of course, it does. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, I think the myth of the American serial killer is so dated, too, right? Like, they just can't do what they were doing then in Ted Bundy's time anymore.

And that's why it's so, like, silly that we're still stuck on. It really is. Yeah. Like, you really almost can't do anything anymore because people have phones, too. Like, there are so many cameras in the world that there just weren't years ago. Right. If you buy a plane ticket, if you use your credit card, like, you know, any of these things, if you use a computer somewhere, like, we can follow you now in ways that we couldn't

before. And not to mention DNA has changed. Yeah, it's also that part. So, yeah, I think technology has really changed the landscape of the serial killer, yet the story we tell is the old version still. That is a really good point. So where can people follow you so that they can keep up with like all your new releases and everything. Just kind of plug whatever.

Yeah, I'm most active on Instagram. I handles just my name, Donnie Kukovka. I use Twitter a little bit, but that's mostly like publishing gossip. It's not particularly like interest my Twitter. I just retweet other people. I rarely tweet myself. But I do post on Instagram pretty regularly and I'm trying to post more. So you can see my dog.

You can see my knitting projects. You can see, yeah, that's where I. My Instagram goes through my dogs and books. So I'm with you on that one. one. Yeah, exactly. Mine dogs and knitting, so totally. So I will put all of the links in the show notes so that people can go check all of that out. And thanks for talking with me.

Thank you. This was wonderful. You were so thoughtful. Thank you for asking such incredible questions.