Dylan Klebold
Dylan Klebold was one of the students who planned and took part in the Columbine Massacre. His name will forever be linked to Eric Harris and the author suggests that might well have been both his most eager desire and his curse through a simple metaphor that manages to describe their relationship in a nutshell:
“Dylan Klebold was a brain, too, but not quite so cool.”
“Eric Harris was a textbook.”
A simple metaphor also describes Harris himself. But this metaphor is nothing without context. And the context makes the metaphor nothing less than horrifying:
"I think he was a full-blown psychopath."
His colleagues agreed.
Prom
Principal Frank DeAngelis is introduced on page one and by page two he is already pictured as obsessing over the prom with concerns about drinking and securing the safety of his students. The prom took place the weekend before the massacre and it plays a major thematic role in the story with DeAngelis considering it in terms more like a metaphorical nightmarish fantasy than a simple dance party:
“Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you've never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets, and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.”
Metaphorical Mythologizing
The author explains how much of the conventional wisdom of what happened at Columbine actually accumulated from the dissemination of misinformation. The mythology spread faster than the truth: “We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened.”
“Satan was at work in Jefferson County”
Some locals were less than surprised by the violence at Columbine. The author states that “by the 1990s, Colorado Springs was christened the Evangelical Vatican” and that well before anyone had ever heard of Harris and Klebold, “tens of thousands of Columbine Evangelicals prepared for the dark prince.”
