Via the WPA-L mailing list comes this little snippet by Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly. Among other things, King talks about how some of his own writing in college would have marked him as “mentally ill.” But here’s my favorite passage from it:
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.
Indeed– the dude was crazy and mean.