Immediately after last week’s shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, Publishers Weekly ran a story about Joseph Lieberman, author of The Shooting Game, explaining how his 2006 history of school shootings had been sucked into the current events cycle. “During an interview last fall,” noted PW‘s Bridget Kinsella, “Lieberman predicted that a very violent attack would happen in April 2007 near the anniversary of the Columbine shooting.” Plans are already underway to revise the book, perhaps even in time for BookExpo, to incorporate coverage of the Virginia Tech killings.
Meanwhile, Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash was using his participation in the London Book Fair as a convenient way to avoid taking part in the media circus that followed the incident, even though he had published Mark Ames‘s Going Postal: Rage, Murder & Rebellion two years ago. “But when I got back, and started to hear the US media, rather than the UK media,” Nash writes on the company’s blog, “I got progressively more pissed off, and decided that, since this book is a necessary polemical and astringent corrective amidst the sanctimonious pabulum of what passes for analysis, I’m drawing to try to draw people’s attention to it, and damn the torpedoes.” He pointed to an article by Ames for Alternet critiquing the media’s “official fake soul-searching”—and debunking many of the myths about how to spot a potential schoolyard shooter perpetuated by “a culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre—one that doesn’t implicate it in the crime.”
Reports that Cho Seung-Hui’s writing supposedly fit the profile of an alleged shooter led Entertainment Weekly to solicit contributing editor Stephen King‘s thoughts on the subject. The problem is that if you’re going to suspect people of being potential killers because of what they write about, you’d have to start with King himself—although the novel Rage has long been out of circulation after earlier school shootings—not to mention a good chunk of the NYT fiction bestseller list (and since Jodi Picoult‘s former #1 bestseller, Nineteen Minutes, deals with the emotional aftermath of a high school shooting, everyone’s been after her to comment). “On the whole, I don’t think you can pick these guys out based on their work,” King ultimately allowed, “unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.” His take on Cho, then? “Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ‘just mean.'”