When does justice stop being fair and start becoming cruel? It’s a question that modern storytelling keeps asking, often through stories that disturb as much as they entertain. Alex Grant’s A Different Approach and Other Stories takes this question head-on, showing how systems designed to protect people can easily twist into instruments of harm. Two of its most powerful stories, TAPP and A Different Approach, offer a striking comparison of how authority and morality can lose balance when rules replace compassion.
In TAPP, Grant imagines a world where the justice system has become terrifyingly literal. The “Authorised Punishment Plan” ensures that criminals are punished in the same way they hurt their victims. On paper, it sounds fair: the punishment fits the crime. But as readers follow the unattractive routine of an executioner carrying out his duties, the system’s cold logic becomes unbearable. The procedures are efficient, the records are neat, and everything runs “by the book.” But the more perfect the system seems, the more inhuman it feels. The story forces us to ask: when justice is stripped of empathy, does it cease to be justice at all?
The story’s power comes from its quiet realism. There are no dramatic speeches or courtroom battles, just the mechanical precision of state-sanctioned violence. Grant never tells us outright what to think, but the horror lies in how normal everything appears. In this world, cruelty hides behind paperwork. The people involved are not villains; they’re professionals following orders. It’s a chilling reminder that moral collapse rarely arrives with a shout; it often comes quietly, disguised as procedure.
A Different Approach, the title story of the collection, explores similar territory but in a setting much closer to everyday life. Here, a local council outsources the penalties for litter enforcement to a private company with a “different zero tolerance” policy. What begins as an apparently routine bureaucratic decision soon spirals out of control. Ordinary citizens who drop a wrapper or fail to clean up after their dogs face very dark consequences.
In both stories, Grant uses the familiar to expose something uncomfortable. Whether it’s the machinery of state punishment or the logic of local policy, both systems show how easily moral judgment can be replaced by blind obedience. The executioners in TAPP believe they are upholding justice. The workers in A Different Approach believe they are keeping order. Both are convinced they’re doing the right thing. However, their actions reveal how fragile the line is between fairness and cruelty.
Grant’s writing stands out because it doesn’t exaggerate. The scenarios feel possible, even probable. Readers finish these stories not just disturbed by what happens but uneasy about how real it all seems.
If you’re drawn to fiction that questions authority, explores morality, and reveals how easily justice can turn into cruelty, read Alex Grant’s A Different Approach and Other Stories and discover how modern storytelling holds a mirror to our own world.
Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FF3PZ1QT/.
