Since finishing The Ceremonies (see below) I’ve cracked through a few very different pieces of work, all of which have their strong points. For a change of pace I went straight in to Dave Cullen’s Columbine, a work of non-fiction which proposes to be the definitive story of the 1999 school-shooting by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Fascinating stuff from start to finish – challenging even the concept of the crime as a ’school shooting’. It turns out that it was actually a massive bombing gone wrong. Cullen’s been on the story since it happened and it’s hard to imagine anyone approaching the story with the same degree of impartiality and lack of hyperbole. He’s also incredibly thorough and comfortable pricking some of the myths that have built up around the massacre – the ’she said yes’ tale leapt on by the religious is well and truly debunked, as is the notion of the shooters and bullied loners who belonged to some sort of shady ‘Trenchcoat Mafia’. Cullen approached his material even-handedly, building up a gradual portrait of the murderers, and tracing their path to the massacre carefully using the documentary evidence left behind by Harris and Klebold. Cullen’s writing style is clipped and clear; unspectacular, but perfectly suited to the material. It’s a fine piece of journalism, stripping the sensation from the story, leaving only something that looks very like the truth.
After finishing Columbine, I read Michel Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft ‘Against the World, Against Life’. Interesting enough, but it probably told me more about Houellbecq than it did about Lovecraft. It did leave me with a taste for the Weird Tale, though, and so I picked up S.T. Joshi’s anthology American Supernatural Tales. Actually, the main reason for picking it up was to read The Events at Poroth Farm by T.E.D Klein, the story on which The Ceremonies was based. It’s certainly a tighter and more satisfying telling of the tale, although I missed the denseness of Klein’s descriptions of New York, and the deft characterisation of Sarr and Deborah Poroth. The main character Jeremy, however, is far more sympathetic in the story than he was in the novel and most of the key scares were transposed almost directly from the original. I still maintain that Klein is far better with the short form than with a novel, but until he produces a bit more work for us to consider it’s impossible to say. His second novel, Nighttown, is supposedly all but finished, but Klein is blocked at the start of the climax. Maybe one day he’ll find the inspiration he needs to finish it off.
The two other standout tales in the anthology so far (I’m about two thirds through it) are The Girl With the Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber, an effortless take on the long-stale vampire story written in an entertainingly hard-boiled style; and The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury. I’m woefully and embarassingly under-read when it comes to Bradbury, although the first volume of his collected short stories is currently waiting on my bedside table, but if The Fog Horn is anything to go by, I’m in for a treat. It’s possibly the best and saddest short story I’ve read in a long time. A synopsis of the plot does it no justice, as its power lies in the persuasive power of Bradbury’s writing. It’s masterful stuff, perfectly composed, and it makes me realise that I’ve a long way to go before I can even hope to matching the perfect simplicity of The Fog Horn.
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You are still being lied to. Big time. If you want to find out what really happened at Columbine I suggest you read what the eyewitnesses had to say:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/columbineeight.php
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Starviego. Have you read the Cullen book? I’d say he does a fairly good job of addressing the discrepancies in various eyewitness reports. The page you link to seems to be a lot like an old, long discredited conspiracy theory to me.
If additional shooters are/were being covered up, then I suppose the question would be: Why?
Interested in your thoughts…
“On Nov. 21, 2008, the Harris and Klebold parents were sent the same letter requesting cooperation. “Your stories have yet to be fully told, and I view your help as an issue of historical significance,” it said. “In 10 years, there have been no major, mainstream books on Columbine. This will be the first, and it may be the only one.” The letter came not from Mr. Cullen but from Jeff Kass, whose Columbine: A True Crime Story, published by the small Ghost Road Press, preceded Columbine by a couple of weeks.
“Mr. Kass, whose tough account is made even sadder by the demise of The Rocky Mountain News in which his Columbine coverage appeared, has also delivered an intensive Columbine overview. Some of the issues he raises and information he digs up go unnoticed by Mr. Cullen.” –Janet Maslin, New York Times
“A decade after the most dramatic school massacre in American history, Jeff Kass applies his considerable reporting talents to exploring the mystery of how two teens could have planned and carried out such gruesome acts without their own family and best friends knowing about it. Actually, there were important clues, but they were missed or downgraded both by those who knew the boys best and by public officials who came in contact with them. An engrossing and cautionary tale for everyone who cares about how to prevent kids from going bad.” —–Ted Gest, President, Criminal Justice Journalists
Thanks, John. I appreciate the kind words.
I can only speculate as to the ‘why.’ Probably because the powers that be were desperate to avoid a trial, so as to avoid any questions as to motive, or perhaps the other suspects would have pointed their fingers higher up in the chain of command.
But you simply can’t ignore the huge number of witnesses who contradict the official version of events.