Our Children, Our Teachers by Michael Bailey

Written Backwards, 2018

Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0996149317

Available: Kindle edition

I was not familiar with Michael Bailey’s work before reading this. Afterwards, I learned that Michael Bailey has been nominated for and has won the Stoker Award in the past. I have to assume that Our Children, Our Teachers is a momentary aberration, because it is a terrible piece of writing. There are unneccessary and misplaced dashes throughout the text, disrupting the flow of the story. It’s poorly structured, with a confusing beginning that doesn’t seem to bear a relationship to the main story, a premise that makes no sense, and an ending so abrupt that I’m still not sure if it’s done or if there are actually pages missing.

The original idea is an interesting one. Eighteen students with seemingly no connection except that all of their parents own guns conspire in planning and carrying out a school shooting. With the school on lockdown, a student in each classroom drives the teacher out into the hallway, which is then followed by the sound of guns firing. This seems to be setting up a somewhat over-the-top commentary on easy availability of guns for kids, but that’s not really where the story goes. Instead (spoiler), the conspirators livestream their demands while holding the school hostage, which are for society to show respect for teachers by compensating them appropriately. Until a long list of demands for higher pay and benefits for teachers are met, one of the conspirators will kill themselves on camera every hour with their entire school watching.

This is just not believable. Even if it were likely that a large group of kids who barely know each other would be willing to work together to plan this, and could keep this a secret, teacher pay is hardly something they would be willing to kill themselves over, and certainly their teachers would be horrified by the idea. Further, kids willing to threaten an entire school and fire live ammunition in the vicinity of their friends and teachers have zero credibility when it comes to demanding respect for their teachers. There’s also no way that this story makes sense logistically. A high school with a thousand students has more than 18 teachers, including multiple counselors, administrators, and support staff, and lockdowns are taken very seriously.

There are glimmers that this could be expanded into something interesting. While I have a hard time believing that these kids were all able to keep it quiet (in my kids’ school anything even remotely questionable ends up reported to resource officers and the front office through an app kids use to submit anonymous tips, and this certainly would have been caught), I’m curious as to how they all connected and committed to this loose plan. Bailey snagged me originally with the students texting back and forth, exerting pressure on each other to participate, as it was clear some of them were hesitant or wanted to back out. That was creepy enough for me to want to keep going a little further. That peer pressure via text message was enough to get kids who rarely met in person and had little in common to do something so horrific was an intriguing thread that I wish he’d followed through on a little more.

The multiple viewpoints have promise, as you start seeing the different students’ perspectives and the difficulty some of the conspirators are having with actually following through, but with so many people involved there isn’t enough time or space to introduce them or explain why they’re participating in this. There’s no inciting incident that seems to be at the center of this, and I honestly have difficulty believing kids are willing to face a prison sentence, kill someone else (yes, that can happen even if you fire at the ceiling or the wall) or kill themselves in front of their teachers and classmates livestreamed on social media, over the issue of teacher compensation. The fact that the reason certain kids were involved because they able to get their guns easily from their parents was also interesting and deserved follow-through. There’s potential here, but at its current length, it fails.

Given his past successes, I’m assuming that in the future Bailey will be producing quality work worth reading, but readers can give this one a pass. Not recommended.

Contains: murder, some gore.

Editor’s note: Our Children, Our Teachers is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Fiction.