"Columbine" by Dave Cullen

"Cafeteria" by Jon Haddock

"Columbine"
By Dave Cullen

Most of the stuff you remember about Columbine is likely bullshit. The endlessly repeated memories and factoids that persist to this day were fished from a shallow river by a bottom-feeding media. Remember the doomed Christian girl, bravely witnessing for Jesus with a gun pointed at her head? That didn't happen. The Trench Coat Mafia tales had little to do with reality. The shooters - Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - were not gay, Goth outcasts seeking vengeance against cruel jocks. They were relatively popular - good students with ample friends. They came from stable two-parent homes in a prosperous community. Yet Harris was almost certainely a textbook psychopath. Klebold was a fucked-up and suicidal kid along for the ride.

They did frequent Hot Topix, play Doom and listen to Rammstein. But while such lapses in taste may be responsible for pregnant teenage girls with bad tattoos, they can't be blamed for serial killers with axes to grind and arsenals aplenty.

And - as the book makes clear - Columbine was less a successful shooting rampage than a failed bombing mission. It was done by a pair of inept amateurs with delusions of grandeur. Harris and Klebold's original plans were much larger and ambitious. The shoddy, homegrown bombs that were designed to bring the building down were mostly failures. Having access to the "Anarchist's Cookbook" does not make somebody an evil genius.

Cullen describes how a daisy-chain of inaccuracies were fed to the media and gave them exactly what they needed to sell papers with little regard for accuracy or logic. A witness repeats sketchy, third-hand information to the press which is seen by other witnesses who then pass that skewed reality on to other media outlets. There were two-thousand witnesses to the Columbine shooting, it's a textbook worthy example of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts.

"Columbine" treads a cautious line recounting the lives of the shooters. Painting them as larger-than-life monsters - as ersatz Manson heirs - would create martyrs for the creepy death-metal crowd that canonizes John Wayne Gacy. Making them pitiful and sad would piss all over the graves of their victims. Cullen does a good job mixing a sober and journalistic worldview with a novelist's knack for telling a compelling story. This isn't a tabloid "TRUE CRIME" book. "In Cold Blood" or "The Executioner's Song" are more apt comparisons.

The important stuff here might not be the survivor's tales or the confused response from law enforcement. It's how the incident was re-purposed and retold according to who was doing the telling and - more importantly - why they were telling that story.

The closest thing to the "real story" is between the covers of this book.