Columbine

Dave Cullen’s nonfiction book, Columbine (2009), chronicles the mass shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, on April 20, 1999. The perpetrators of the shooting, Columbine High seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed thirteen people—twelve students and one teacher—and injured another two-dozen, before taking their own lives.

Cullen’s book moves backward and forward in time, chronicling the lives of the shooters, the victims, the victims’ families, and others both before and after the April 20 shooting. The majority of the book’s fifty-three chapters are quite brief (ten pages or less, and, in many cases, less than five). Cullen, a journalist, shifts his language from the procedural to the more ornate as needed, moving from detail-rich and information-heavy sections to sections that are in-scene and literary.

Over the course of the book, Cullen offers ample information about the lives of both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, from their childhoods up to the morning of the attack. Eric is presented as a clinical psychopath by Cullen via the extensive research conducted by former FBI agent and hostage negotiator Dwayne Fuselier. Fuselier is the first federal agent on the scene of the massacre due to his son attending Columbine High.