It Has Come To This

Michael Co, author of "The Off Season" from the PGS Special Holiday Issue, sent in this article about a high school junior who got arrested for a violent piece he wrote. His grandparents found his journal, were disturbed by what they read, and turned him in to the police. The student insists it's all a big misunderstanding, that his work was a short story about zombies attacking a high school, and it was meant to be submitted as an English class requirement.

"My story is based on fiction," said the student, William Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Click here to read the whole article.

I'm reminded of Cho Seung-Hui, the gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in mid-August last year. His English professor and classmates had a first-hand view of his writing, which warned of his anger at the world. Nothing was done, and tragedy followed.

And yet, how do you walk this line? How can you tell apart a writer who simply wants to tell a story, and a disturbed individual? If Stephen King had written "Rage" in a similar climate as today's, would he still be the author he is today, or would he have been turned in by his teachers and been black-marked for the rest of his life?

Mr. King did write about the Virginia Tech incident. An excerpt:

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do. Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.

As of now, Poole remains in custody, and a judge raised his bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the case.