“The Question My Son Asked” (1962)

[spoilers] Stanley Ellin (not to be confused with Stanley Elkin) was a successful and prolific writer in a mystery verging on horror (or “suspense”) subgenre favored at midcentury. He wrote several novels and some Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes but was known more as a short story writer, which won him a bunch of Edgars and eventually a Grand Master Award in 1981 from the Mystery Writers of America organization, of which he was a longtime member and past president. This is a horror story insofar as it is a look inside the mind of a homicidal maniac—or that’s the twist anyway, revealed in the last sentence. The first-person narrator is an electrician by day, an executioner on the side. He somewhat primly tells us he calls himself an “electrocutioner” because the electric chair is his medium. He is equally pedantic about defending the death penalty, saying that juries and judges are as culpable as he is. He keeps his work a secret because of the stigma, but he is seething with resentment about society’s judgment. Also, this is an “all in the family” enterprise—his father was an electrician and executioner, and he hopes his son will be too. Indeed, the son is already an electrician. But he recoils when his father tells him of his electrocution work. I’ve seen accounts around the internet saying this story is ambivalent or ambiguous about where it stands on the death penalty. It doesn’t seem so to me. In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court was not far from outlawing capital punishment altogether, which stood for 10 years or whatever, until Gary Gilmore came along and got us all mixed up again. This story has also been published under the title “The Question,” so portentous does it want us to take the plot point that goes on at the end:

    You enjoy it, don’t you? [my son asked]....
    Enjoy it?
    That was the question my son asked me. That was what he said to me, as if I didn’t have the same feelings deep down in me that we all have.
    Enjoy it?
    But, my God, how could anyone not enjoy it?

Rimshot. And therein lies the rub, or something. The story is pretty clearly opposed to the death penalty, making its principal out to be a psychopath, and thus less horror and more social commentary. The narrator and electrocutioner is not likable at all. He’s thin-skinned and petulant. When we find out he’s a sadist who enjoys killing people with the electric chair, deaths he describes in some graphic detail, it doesn’t help us like him any better. But, come on, it’s not fair to imply that anyone who favors the death penalty is a homicidal sadist—as social commentary it’s a little like holding soldiers responsible for foreign policy. It might be even less fair to claim this is a competent horror story, as much as I may agree with the moral of it. It is intended primarily to shock but only in the service of a larger social point. Horror is better off without social points and morals.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Listen to story online.