Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine used to just be the name of a regular high school, but after April 20th, 1999, it became so much more. Since that fateful date, the name Columbine brings to mind horrific images. This book brings to life the backstories of all of those images. It dismantles an unbelievable number of myths, legends and corruption surrounding that infamous massacre.

Immediately after the event, there was rampant speculation about how two seemingly normal boys decided to one day walk into their school and shoot up their classmates. Was it violent video games? Hardcore music? Gangs? Bullying? Bad parenting? The answers took years to figure out, and they're all in here. Dave Cullen took ten years to write this book and it shows. I can easily state that this is one of the most thoroughly researched and well-written non-fiction books I've read. 

When I thought back to Columbine before reading this book, I pictured two high school kids in black trench coats creating mayhem one day. But the story goes back way further than just that day and it involves so much more than just the two shooters. It forever changed the lives of two thousand students, teachers and their families through fear, violence, death, injury, PTSD, suicide, survivor's guilt, involvement on the periphery of the crimes, deception, and corruption. It is definitely not the story of just one day. It was a year of planning for the shooters and over a decade of truth-seeking for the survivors. It was not a single-day event; it was - and continues to be - a saga.

Dave Cullen managed to sift through an Everest of documentation and not only distilled it all down to make sense, providing explanations for motives and describing the aftermath in detail but, equally importantly, he also showed us the complicated reactions of the people involved. Reading about them never made anyone feel like characters in a book, but real people with real feelings and emotions. He made a nonsensical event make sense. He somehow wrote about an overwhelming amount of information and number of people, yet it was never hard to remember who was who or what their specific relation to the story was. Though the subject matter was gory and unbelievable and very much felt like a movie because the terror of what happened is just unimaginable, the writing was never sensational; he stuck to the facts and let the story tell itself. 

In an interesting twist of timing, I just came across a copy of A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, written by Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the two killers. It was just published in 2016. It's noted throughout Columbine that the parents of both of the shooters kept an extremely low profile and rarely spoke out, so I'm eager to read her side of the tragedy. Because that's what this story really is: an unimaginable tragedy. After feeling so immersed in every aspect of it throughout this book, I wish peace for everyone involved in any way.