MOLLY McCLOSKEYreviews ColumbineBy Dave Cullen, Old Street Publishing 358pp, £9.99
TEN YEARS ago this month, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School carrying explosives, sawn-off shotguns, a semi-automatic handgun, a rifle and several knives.
They planned to set off a bomb in their school, then pick off fleeing survivors. They had also loaded their cars with explosives, timed to detonate as police, paramedics and journalists were arriving on the scene.
The carnage could have been massive – Columbine High School, near Littleton, Colorado, had about 2,000 students – but the bombs failed to go off. The boys’ dreams of Armageddon fizzled down to a shooting spree which left 13 dead. Forty-nine minutes after entering the school, the boys killed themselves.
Columbine was not the US’s first school shooting nor has it been the worst – 33 people died at Virginia Tech in 2007 – but “Columbine” has become synonymous with this kind of violence.
The siege played out on television. The killers left stacks of written and recorded material detailing their plans for “Judgment Day”. Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine helped to stamp the name into our heads.
Now Dave Cullen has written a meticulous account of the killings and what led up to and followed from them. Cullen covered Columbine for Salon and he knows the story and its protagonists inside out. He dispels many of the myths that grew up around the shootings.
The stories he tells are fascinating, including that of the ineptitude and outright deception of local law enforcement officials.
Columbine is being marketed as a great work of true crime, in the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and lovers of true crime will enjoy it. (The detailed account of the siege gave me nightmares.) Cullen has done an amazing job of assembling a coherent and often gripping narrative out of truckloads of documents and often conflicting testimony. But there is something disappointing about an intelligent study that gives us all the nasty details of a crime and its aftermath, and yet neglects the bigger picture regarding the why?
Drawing on the work of experts, Cullen explains that Eric was a textbook (juvenile) psychopath and Dylan a suicidal depressive who fell under his friend’s sway. Accurate as the diagnoses may be, the boys’ actions, fantasies and obsessions are part of a phenomenon that is larger than their respective psychological profiles.
There have been more than 80 school shootings in the US since Columbine (Cullen gives no stats for Europe) and, while he has much to say about the indicators of psychopathy, he has virtually nothing to say about how western, particularly American, culture is nourishing adolescent alienation and violence.
Putting aside the obvious issue of gun control (Cullen devotes only a handful of pages to this, noting that no significant national gun-control legislation was enacted as a result of Columbine), what about the link between affluence and the nihilistic, death- obsessed tone that teenage angst has assumed?
What about the rise in teenage depression? (Eric was on Luvox at the time of the killings.) Why does a highly intelligent boy like Dylan Klebold wake in a nice house, bid his loving parents goodbye, drive to school in his BMW, then rant in his journal about “this toilet earth”? Is labelling him a depressive sufficient? The boys didn’t come of age in a vacuum.
Clearly, I’m looking for a broader sociological study than Cullen aimed to provide. But isn’t Columbine precisely the kind of book that should be interrogating the context in which violence like this occurs?
Molly McCloskey is a novelist and short story writer