I'm not a typically a reader of true-crime books, so I was somewhat surprised that I was interested in reading Columbine by Dave Cullen. I seemed to know the story as well as I knew any large-scale societal disaster narrative: two loner kids, members of a bullied outcast group called the Trench Coat Mafia, snapped and killed twelve fellow students (mostly jocks and pretty people) and a teacher at a Colorado high school, then killed themselves, leaving a small town in perpetual shock and misery.But journalist Cullen has followed the story for ten years and has written a excellent account of the massacre and the aftermath, and his main achievement is to undo the myths that were perpetuated by the media: the two weren't members of any Trench Coat group; though they were fringe figures in their class, they weren't bullied--in fact, they often bullied others; they didn't target jocks but killed completely at random; their original plan was to blow up the school building, an act which would have killed hundreds of students, and scarily, they had the firepower to do so, but the big bombs fizzled. Also, the much-vaunted martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, who supposedly was asked if she believed in God, boldly said "Yes," and was promptly shot, is revealed as essentially an urban legend based on something that actually did happen to a different student who was injured but not killed.
The book is very well written, though oddly structured: the first hundred pages begins with prom weekend just before the shootings to the end of the day of the massacre, April 20th, 1999. Then the narrative goes off in two branches; one deals with the aftermath as experienced by the school, the survivors, the town, and the parents of the killers; the other deals with the killers, more or less chronologically from a couple of years earlier, when the lead killer, Eric Harris, started slipping off the rails. The final chapter, "Quiet," is especially powerful, a brief reconstruction of the massacre as it might have been seen by the killers. The consensus seems to be that Harris was, plain and simple, a psychopath; he had no gut-gnawing revenge to enact against those who had wronged him, he simply hated human beings, thought he was superior to almost everyone around him, and lacked any real empathy for others. I thought the author could have given a little more time in the book to fleshing out portraits of the dead students, some of whom are barely even mentioned by name, but aside from some fleeting problems with the structure, that's my only criticism of this excellent, eye-opening book.
1 comment:
Thanks for the review, Mike. I heard an interview w/the author on NPR a day or two ago, and thought the book sounded really interesting, precisely because it cleared up a lot of the "mythology" surrounding the events.
I remember very clearly the day it happened: I was flying back to Denver after my job interview at OSU/Newark. Of course, I heard about the shootings as soon as I landed, and for the rest of the afternoon.
I had a night class that evening, and some of the students were upset that I hadn't canceled class (?). Interestingly, one who *didn't* raise a fuss turned out to be a Columbine grad, whose younger brother was in the school that day.
I don't know what my own need to plunge ahead was about, other than an innate distaste for people who exploit other people's tragedies as their own (had the same feeling after 9/11). But ten years on, I would like to read this book to see what, if any, sense can be made of such a senseless event.
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