Apt Pupil: The Making of a “Bogeyboy”

Abstract

On May 26, 1999, in his keynote address at the annual meeting of the Vermont Library Conference, Stephen King reflected on the spate of adolescent violence in American schools that had culminated the previous month in the massacre of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Without condoning the acts of individuals like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, he saw them as part of a pattern rooted in American history and embedded in contemporary society’s easy access to guns and the culture of violence in America’s entertainment industry—from which latter point he did not exempt his own work. With teenage killers well on their way to becoming the new “bogeyboys” of American culture, objects of fear whom we claim not to understand, King argued that “perhaps the real first step in making them go away is to decide what it is about them that frightens us so much.”1