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Book Review: Our Children, Our Teachers by Michael Bailey

 

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.

 

Posted on March 30, 2019 by , Reply

Real Life Horrors, Continued

These past few days have been difficult ones that involve a lot of soul-searching.

I remember the shock of Columbine. It wasn’t the first, or the last, school shooting in this country. Teenagers have turned on their classmates and teachers with guns enough for it to be the subject of books, both fiction and nonfiction, for a long time. A few months ago, I wrote about one of these, Stephen King’s Rage, that he originally wrote in 1966, while he was actually still in high school himself. After Rage was found in the possession of a school shooter many decades later, King had the book pulled from publication. He spoke about his reasoning, and his thoughts on school shooters, at a conference of the Vermont Library Association (click here to see what he said) and called for an examination of our country’s culture and violence. Columbine, and so many other school shootings (and attempted school shootings), all took place in high schools and middle schools. They were shootings by teenagers of teenagers– classmates and teachers. And there is both fiction and nonfiction out there on school shootings, written for teens, parents, activists, and counselors.

What happened on December 14 is different. The real life horror that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary is unimaginable. In writing about real life horrors not that long ago, I made picture book recommendations that might help in discussing some of the terrible things that exist in this world with children. So many of those titles are about events far away or long ago– there is nothing about the possibility of someone walking into a child’s school to commit such a horrifying act. And it’s not just because I couldn’t, or didn’t, think of it. A search of Amazon shows just one book for young children (recommended for grades 3 and older) that even touches on the topic: The Berenstain Bears and No Guns Allowed by Stan and Jan Berenstain. I hope someone writes something for younger kids, and for their families, to help them through this very uncertain and scary time. I have a kindergartener and first grader myself, so this hits very close to home for me, and I wish there were more resources to turn to. Although at this point you have probably talked to your kids about the events at Sandy Hook Elementary if you plan to do so, here are a few resources I have discovered that may be helpful.

When You Are Done Hugging Your Kids Too Tightly, Elmo Will Help You Figure Out What To Say Nextfrom Upworthy.com

Tragic Events in the News— tips for talking to your kids from Mr. Rogers

Talking to Children About the School Shooting from Psychology Today

One of the life saving individuals of Sandy Hook Elementary was Maryann Jacob, a library clerk who called the office when the intercom clicked on and learned immediately of the shooting(she was interviewed by the Boston Herald here). She got the class of fourth graders in the school library to safety, and ran across the hall to warn another class. Then she ran back to the library to stay with her class. So many people put their lives on the line to save others– it’s truly amazing that this selflessness outweighed the instinct for survival.

My heart goes out to everyone affected by this tragedy. No one, child or adult, should ever have to face, or live, real-life horror.

Posted on December 18, 2012 by , Reply

Banned Books Week: Rage by Stephen King

In doing a little research on Stephen King for Banned Books Week (many of his books have been challenged or banned) I learned something I didn’t know about. I always thought that his first book was Carrie, but Carrie was actually his first published book. I knew King had also previously written under the name Richard Bachman, and I’ve actually read two of them, Thinner and The Running Man (and find both terrifying). But, since I don’t keep up on these things I didn’t know that the first four Bachman novels had been published together. One of the stories included in that omnibus is King’s first novel, Rage, which tells the story of a high school shooter who takes his Algebra II class hostage, and the events that unroll within the classroom walls as everyone reveals their secrets. Rage was published in 1977, and republished with the other Bachman novels in 1985.  According to James Smythe, a writer for the Guardian who is rereading all of King’s work in chronological order (click here to see his commentary on Rage), King actually began writing this book in 1966, when he was still himself in high school. Today it seems unnervingly prescient, and in fact school shootings in 1989, 1996, and 1997  were apparently influenced by the book. After a fourth incident, when a 14 year old boy named Michael Carneal shot eight students at his high school, killing three, and also turned out to have Rage in his possession, King requested that the publisher let the book go out of print. It’s the only one of King’s books to have gone out of print. In a keynote he gave to the Vermont Library Association, he said (and this is a paraphrase):

 

Do I think that Rage may have provoked Carneal, or any other badly adjusted young person, to resort to the gun?

… There are factors in the Carneal case which make it doubtful that Rage was the defining factor, but I fully recognize that it is in my own self-interest to feel just that way; that I am prejudiced in my own behalf. I also recognize the fact that a novel such as Rage may act as an accelerant on a troubled mind… That such stories, video games… or photographic scenarios will exist no matter what–that they will be obtainable under the counter if not over it–begs the question. The point is that I don’t want to be a part of it. Once I knew what had happened, I pulled the ejection-seat lever on that particular piece of work. I withdrew Rage, and I did it with relief rather than regret.

Rage is not a banned book. If you wanted to, you could, I suppose, seek it out. But, even though King has written another novel about a murderous high school student, Carrie, Carrie doesn’t seem to inspire the uncomfortable feeling Rage did, for him to allow it to go out of print. He continues to write stories and books that inspire terror and horror, or at least unease, and has written other books that have been challenged or banned, something he strongly believes should always be protested.

So perhaps it comes down to this question: What is the responsibility of the author to his or her readers, and to society? The ideas and words contained in a book can be very powerful and it’s always possible that they will lead to destructive (or incredibly inspiring) acts. There’s always someone at the tipping point. That doesn’t mean the person will necessarily fall or that the work should be silenced. Earshot, the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that contained a school shooting and was scheduled to be shown shortly after the Columbine shooting, was pushed back further into that season, but it hasn’t faded into obscurity. In the same keynote address, King noted:

If, on the other hand, you were to ask me if the presence of potentially unstable or homicidal persons makes it immoral to write a novel or make a movie in which violence plays a part, I would say absolutely not. In most cases, I have no patience with such reasoning. I reject it as both bad thinking and bad morals. Like it or not, violence is a part of life and a unique part of American life. If accused of being part of the problem, my response is the time-honored reporter’s answer: “Hey, many, I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

Perhaps it just makes King uncomfortable that the sale of Rage might have been a motivating factor in more than one of the cases I mentioned above. I know I would feel that way. He wasn’t forced into his decision– letting Rage go out of print was a personal decision and a request he made of his publisher. It does beg the question though–  where do we draw the line, as readers and writers? It’s something each of us must do on our own. King drew his. Where would you draw yours?

 

 

Posted on October 3, 2012 by , 2 comments