Stephen King Weighs In On Virginia Tech
It is impossible not to have heard of the tragic deaths at Virgina Tech last week in a Columbine-style school shooting. As happens with any tragedy in this day of instant media access, the perpetrator of the crime is being analyzed by the general public, as if it would be possible to make sense from the senseless. Theories have run the gamut, from autism and other mental illness to seeing the perpetrator’s college writing as a “flag”.
EW.com had Stephen King, master horror writer, weigh in on the theory that the killer’s writings could have been some kind of flag. King, in short, says there is no evidence that writing is anything more than a safe outlet for these kinds of thoughts. He ventures that we shouldn’t shut down this outlet for the rest of the world out of paranoid from this incident, and cites several examples of authors whose writing is violent or horror-filled that are nothing more than nice people who write.
My favorite quote from the article:
For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). 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.
You can read the full article here.
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