Columbine High School Massacre in Modern Culture - Literature

Literature

• Dave Cullen's 2009 bestseller Columbine took a comprehensive look at the massacre in narrative form. It profiled the killers and ten years of the aftermath. The book won several awards, including the Edgar, and was named on 22 Best of 2009 lists.

• In Marisha Pessl's novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a student describes a teacher as tweaked and says, "Wouldn't be shocked if she went Klebold."

• Similarities to the massacre were visible in Douglas Coupland's 2003 novel Hey Nostradamus! (which, contrary to popular belief, Coupland had begun writing before the shooting happened).

• An unpublished issue of Hellblazer by Warren Ellis (writer) and Phil Jimenez (artist) depicted a study of a series of fictional school shootings. The series is monthly and it would have been the September 1999 (#141) issue, however the August 1999 (#140) was followed by the October 1999 (#141) issue.

• The novel Vernon God Little deals with similar, though fictional, events. It focuses on the suspicions placed on innocent students as a result to these shootings.

• Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin was partly inspired by the Columbine massacre and similar school shootings. The protagonist is the mother of a boy who has committed a mass shooting at his own high school.

• The satirical newspaper The Onion discussed the massacre in its article Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying.

• Give A Boy A Gun is about a school shooting that two boys are planning to commit at a school dance, told from students and faculty at the school. The two boys are in fascination with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and hope to have a great impact like Columbine.

• Photographic coverage of the aftermath of the shooting, particularly the reactions of students, won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for the year 2000 for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

• Stephen King has cited the massacre as a major reason that he has allowed an early novel to fall out of print: Rage, written under the Richard Bachman pen name, which deals with a high school gunman. (However, certain themes in the book were developed into the story of Carrie.) King actually referred to Carrie as the "female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold."

• Mark Rempel wrote a book Point Blank based loosely on the Columbine Shootings and their impact.

• Jim Shepard's novel Project X was inspired by the events at Columbine. Character Edwin says "So wait we are gonna pull the same thing at that school in Colorado? What was it's name again?"

• Walter Dean Myers wrote Shooter, inspired by the Columbine shootings.

• Francine Prose's After, a teen novel about teens in a school freaked by a local school shooting, calls the shooting "another Columbine."

• In Book 11 of the Everworld series, a fantasy serial by K. A. Applegate, a protagonist, Christopher, describes another teen shooting at him as a "little Klebold-Harris psychopath."

• Jodi Picoult's novel released in March 2007 Nineteen Minutes depicts a Columbine-like school shooting in New Hampshire, and contains direct references to the Columbine shootings.

• A story arc in the online comic Jack revolves around a plot based on the Columbine massacre.

• In Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty", character Kiki Belsey teases her son, saying, "You're not gonna put on a trench coat and shoot up your school, now, are you, baby?"

• Wally Lamb's "The Hour I First Believed" follows the life of a fictional Columbine High School nurse, and her teacher husband, as they deal with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after she survives the library massacre.