Author | Douglas Coupland |
---|---|
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Bloomsbury USA |
Publication date | July 2, 2004 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
Pages | 244 pp |
ISBN | 1-58234-415-9 |
OCLC | 55055459 |
813/.54 22 | |
LC Class | PS3553.O855 H49 2004 |
Preceded by | All Families Are Psychotic |
Followed by | Eleanor Rigby |
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Hey Nostradamus! is a novel by Douglas Coupland centred on a fictional 1988 school shooting in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia and its aftermath. It was first published by Random House of Canada in 2003. The novel comprises four first-person narratives, each from the perspective of a character directly or indirectly affected by the shooting. The novel intertwines substantial themes, including adolescent love, sex, religion, prayer and grief.
The novel follows the stories of victims of a fictional school shooting in North Vancouver in 1988. Coupland has expressed his concern that the killers of the Columbine High School massacre received more focus than the victims; this is his story about the victims of tragedy. [1] The novel is told in four parts, each with a different narrator and focus.
Cheryl Anway, the seventeen-year-old victim of a shooting massacre at her high school at Delbrook Senior Secondary, recounts her life from a liminal state where she is dead but can still hear the prayers and curses of those who are alive.
Cheryl was pregnant, having recently consummated her relationship with her long-term boyfriend, Jason, after they married in Las Vegas. Cheryl and Jason are members of a group of young Christians.
During the shooting, Cheryl is trapped under a table in the cafeteria. While the killers make their way through the crowd, one of them decides that he has had enough of the killing and wants to stop. The other killers decide that he has become weak, and kill him. They then turn their attention to Cheryl and her friends, and Cheryl becomes the final casualty. Before Cheryl is murdered, she witnesses Jason killing one of the gunman with a rock, enabling the other students to subdue and kill the final gunman.
Eleven years after the massacre, Jason struggles to cope with life. He writes a letter to his twin nephews, born after the death of his older brother, Kent.
Jason works as a carpenter with no true friends, frequently drinking and occasionally blacking out. He reveals that after he killed one of the school shooters, his father Reg was angry with him and his alcoholic mother left Reg. Jason was investigated by the police and was devastated when his Christian friends and Cheryl's family turn against him. He is eventually cleared and his mother takes him to New Brunswick to recuperate.
During one of his present-day drinking binges, Jason blacks out and comes to in an isolated location aware that he is about to be murdered by Yorgos, a friend of his boss. Jason defends himself and is able to escape from Yorgos; rather than kill him, however, Jason leaves him injured and sends help to him.
At the end of his letter, Jason reveals to his nephews that after Kent died, his widow Barb asked Jason to impregnate her so that she could pass the child off as Kent's. Jason agreed under the condition that Barb marry him; they did so in Las Vegas, mimicking the conditions under which he married Cheryl. During their trip to Vegas, they are spotted by an acquaintance whom Barb later murders to protect her secret. Nine months later the twins are born.
A court reporter, Heather is in distress after her boyfriend Jason goes missing.
She receives a call from a woman named Allison claiming to be a fake psychic who has had a real vision. Allison uses a secret language that is personal to Heather and Jason, making Heather believe that Jason is trying to contact her.
Despite claiming not to want money, Allison begins to extort money from Heather to pass on her messages. Heather decides to try to track down Allison and learns she is named Cecilia. She sees Cecilia with a young woman with whom she believes Jason had been having an affair. When Heather confronts the woman, she reveals she is Cecilia's daughter. Her mother came to know of the secret language because Jason came to her with detailed notes, wanting to pass along the information if he ever went missing.
Heather is left wondering about Jason's past, unaware that his decision was prompted by a chance meeting with Yorgos.
Reg writes an open letter to his son, lamenting that he was a harsh and abusive father under the guise of being a Christian for most of Jason's childhood.
Reg repents of the way he treated both Jason and Kent, and regrets that he destroyed his relationship with a woman named Ruth because he would not divorce Jason's mother. He reveals that though Jason is still missing the RCMP located a shirt of his in the woods and Reg plans to post copies of his letter to trees hoping that somehow Jason will be able to read it.
Coupland began to write the novel in December 2001, after a "nightmarish 40-city tour" [2] of the United States that allowed him to experience the country's "collective sorrow". [2] He began to research the events of the Columbine massacre after this experience.
Some people say, how come you never explored the motives of the ones who did the shooting. To my mind, that was all people talked about. I'm very much a fan of JG Ballard, where you have people in this fantastically quotidian situation that goes suddenly wrong, and how people deal with that. Killers get too much press already. I remember growing up, the stories in which they live happily ever after, and the only part that I was interested was, like, after that. Well it was fun for a while then they broke up and she got into crystal meth, found religion and turned into a lesbian. That's the part I wanted to know. That's far more interesting to me.
The quotation from Corinthians that opens the novel was found on a gravestone of a child who died in a high school shooting. [1]
The novel was an international best-seller and was received well by critics.
One lesson I've learned is that you can never guess how a work will be received, … Curiously, The Rocky Mountain News, which is the daily that did the most intense documentation of the incident, and which is the one paper I might have been a bit tetchy about, gave the book an A-minus and told its readers that the memory of Columbine was respected, and in no way diminished or exploited. My personal litmus test was that I didn't want any family member of a Columbine shooting to feel that their loss was being exploited.
The novel was released the same week as Gus Van Sant's film Elephant , which also dealt with a Columbine-like situation.
Coupland also had an art installation on the same topic, called "Tropical Birds", which featured 3D versions of the kneeling figure from the front cover of Hey Nostradamus!, and other pieces which features scenes from a school shooting tragedy. [4]
The Columbine High School massacre, commonly referred to as Columbine, was a school shooting and a failed bombing that occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States. The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve students and one teacher. Ten of the twelve students killed were in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently died by suicide. Twenty-one additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was also exchanged with the police. Another three people were injured trying to escape. The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, until it was surpassed by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, and later the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022, and the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until the Parkland high school shooting in February 2018. Columbine is still considered one of the most infamous massacres in the U.S. for inspiring most other school shootings and bombings, the word "Columbine" has since become a byword for modern school shootings. Columbine still remains both the deadliest mass shooting and the deadliest school shooting to occur in the U.S. state of Colorado.
Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold were two American high school seniors and mass murderers who perpetrated the Columbine High School massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 in Columbine, Colorado. Harris and Klebold killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 24 others. After killing most of their victims in the school's library, they died by self-inflicted gunshot wounds. At the time, it was the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.
Cassie René Bernall was an American student who was killed in the Columbine High School massacre, where 11 more students and a teacher were killed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then committed suicide. It was reported that Bernall had been asked whether or not she believed in God, and she said "Yes", before being shot during the massacre. However, investigators concluded the person who was asked about her belief in God was Valeen Schnurr, who survived the shooting.
Rachel Joy Scott was an American student who was the first fatality of the Columbine High School massacre, in which 11 other students and a teacher were also murdered by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then committed suicide.
Life After God is a collection of short stories by Douglas Coupland, published in 1994. The stories are set around a theme of a generation raised without religion. The jacket for the hardcover book reads "You are the first generation to be raised without religion." The text is an exploration of faith in this vacuum of religion. The stories are also illustrated by the author. Several critics have suggested that this publication marks an early shift in the stylistic vocabulary of Coupland and, according to one critic, he was "excoriated presumably for attempting be serious and to express depression and spiritual yearning when his reviewers were expecting more postmodern jollity". However, the short story would later come to garner more praise though critics and academics have paid little attention to the publication in terms of academics' articles and commentary.
The Red Lake shootings were a spree killing that occurred on March 21, 2005, in two places on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota, United States. That afternoon, 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and his grandfather's girlfriend at their home. After taking his grandfather's police weapons and bulletproof vest, Weise drove his grandfather's police vehicle to Red Lake Senior High School, where he had been a student some months before.
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! is a role-playing video game created by Danny Ledonne and released in April 2005. The game recreates the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Columbine, Colorado. Players assume the roles of gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and act out the massacre, with flashbacks relating parts of Harris and Klebold's past experiences. The game begins on the day of the shootings and follows Harris and Klebold after their suicides to fictional adventures in perdition.
Give a Boy a Gun is an epistolary novel for young adults by Todd Strasser, first published in 2000. The novel describes the events and social circumstances that lead up to, and form the aftermath of, a fictional school shooting. The story is presented in the form of segments of transcribed post-incident interviews with students, parents, teachers, and community members, compiled by Denise Shipley, a journalism student who is the stepsister of one of the shooters. The interviews provide a variety of viewpoints on the incident – some sympathetic, others hostile. Interspersed through the book are footnotes providing statistical information about guns and gun violence.
Nineteen Minutes (2007) is the fourteenth novel by the American author Jodi Picoult. It was Picoult's first book to debut at #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. This novel follows the unfolding of a school shooting, including the events leading up to the incident and the aftermath of the incident.
April Showers is a 2009 American independent drama film written and directed by Andrew Robinson. It stars Kelly Blatz, Daryl Sabara, Ellen Woglom, Illeana Douglas, Janel Parrish, and Tom Arnold. It is based on the Columbine High School shootings, of which Robinson is a survivor. The film was shot at Plattsmouth High School in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, in May 2008.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a mass shooting that occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, United States, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 people. Twenty of the victims were children between six and seven years old, and the other six were adult staff members. Earlier that day, before driving to the school, Lanza fatally shot his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the school, Lanza killed himself, shooting himself in the head.
I'm Not Ashamed is a 2016 American biographical drama film directed by Brian Baugh and based on the journals of Rachel Scott, the first victim of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Columbine, Colorado. Scott, played by Masey McLain, serves as the protagonist of the film; the story of both gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, is intertwined with hers and this indicates the two were the antagonists. The film was distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment. It received generally negative reviews from critics and audiences. It performed poorly at the box office as well, with revenue of $2.1 million compared to the $1.5 million budget of the film.
A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy is a 2016 memoir by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold. Along with Eric Harris, Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The book details the childhood and teenage years of her son, and what she says are signs she missed that Dylan was suffering from clinical depression. The book also examines her grieving process in dealing with the fallout of the massacre.
In the morning of October 20, 2017, an unnamed 14-year-old student of the private school Goyases, in Goiânia, Brazil opened fire against his classmates with a .40-caliber Taurus PT100 pistol, leaving two dead, and four injured. He tried to commit suicide but was convinced not to by a school teacher, being arrested minutes after the incident.
"Shoot" is a controversial American comic book story that was scheduled to appear in the 141st issue of the horror series Hellblazer in 1999, published by DC Comics under its Vertigo imprint. Written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Phil Jimenez and Andy Lanning, "Shoot" follows a researcher who searches for the cause of school shootings; she eventually discovers that John Constantine, the magic-using protagonist of Hellblazer, was present at several massacres. Constantine explains to her that he has been looking into the phenomenon, and says it happens because the victims have lost the will to live.
She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall is a memoir by Misty Bernall about the life of her daughter Cassie Bernall who was killed during the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999.
Susan Francis Klebold is an American activist and author whose son, Dylan Bennet Klebold, was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. After the massacre, she wrote A Mother's Reckoning, a book about the signs and possible motives she missed of Dylan's mental state.