In Alex Grant’s A Different Approach and Other Stories, readers are thrust into unsettling moral terrain where the boundaries between justice, cruelty, and human detachment blur. The story begins with Mason Torville a prisoner sentenced to death, and Keith Hayman a prison officer tasked with carrying out the sentence. This is to be done in the manner that Torville killed his victim; by beating and starvation.
What makes this narrative striking isn’t merely the brutality of the punishment, but the detached, bureaucratic manner in which Keith carries it out. His every move is dictated by TAPP—The Authorised Punishment Plan handed down by the court. Rather than improvising cruelty or delivering personal vengeance, Keith follows instructions as though he were ticking off items on a grocery list. The acts he commits on Torville are not about rage, nor even about discipline—they are about compliance, procedure, and the grim performance of justice.
And yet, beneath Keith’s obedience lies something more personal. Grant hints at Keith’s calculated calmness: his refusal to listen to Torville’s mumbling, his deliberate ignorance of any last-ditch plea for humanity. To Keith, Torville is not a man but an inevitability—a body already marked by death, a canvas on which punishment is painted stroke by stroke. And on this particular day Torville is only the first of Keith’s punishment duties. There is much other work to be done….
The narrative raises unsettling questions: Is Keith an agent of justice or a prisoner of procedure? Does his insistence on watching Torville’s suffering reflect sadism, or is it the defense mechanism of someone clinging to meaning in a world where punishment must always “fit the crime”?
Grant’s story, like much of his collection, does not provide easy answers. Instead, it forces the reader to confront the idea that institutional machinery can normalise the unthinkable. Keith’s desire to see Torville die is not a personal obsession; it is the outcome of a system designed to reduce human suffering into steps, protocols, and authorizations.
In A Different Approach and Other Stories, justice is never straightforward. It is haunting, ambiguous, and disturbingly human.
