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Half Mast
Alex, the protagonist of the story, is a geeky kid. He gets picked on. And he kills somebody because of it. But that's pretty much where the similarities between Alex and Dylan Klebold end.
What's refreshing about Half Mast is how the author accurately captures the world of a high-school outsider. Writers can be pretty introverted types themselves, but few of them end up killing anybody. So when they try to imagine the type of character who would, a lot of them tend to fall into the trap of inventing someone even more unfathomably nerdy than themselves. Thankfully, Null avoids this.
Alex isn't a complete, pathetic loner. He has friends. And together, Alex, Travis and James aren't the typical cookie-cutter stereotypes of kids too terminally dorky to get with the program. They're not so trollish that they can't get within booger-flicking distance of a girl, or so chess-club square that they wouldn't touch a drop of alcohol at a party (in fact, they spend much of their summers doing just the opposite). Null gets it: that most geeks aren't necessarily "deprived," and being an outsider isn't always about being excluded. It's about being different -- and that, in and of itself, can have its consequences.
In Alex's case, his nemesis is Steve Williams: hometown hero, star athlete, the pride and joy of Fall Valley High -- if you care about that sort of thing, that is. Alex doesn't, particularly. He fails to kowtow to Steve the way the way Fall Valley's golden boy thinks he deserves -- and here's where his proverbial troubles begin. Steve subjects Alex to a series of humiliating tortures that should have even the most picked-on geek cringing.
When Alex does finally strike back, it isn't with a hail of gunfire, either. He's calculating about it. I must admit, I'm not really convinced that Alex's modus operandi would actually pan out the way it does in Half Mast. But it certainly makes for more interesting reading than your standard shoot-out, and in its way, it's much more sinister. Also, because Alex doesn't have the option of the Columbine killers' quick way out, he's forced to live with his actions and their impact on his own life.
That's the book's focus, and what saves it from being just another wannabe crime thriller. Christopher Null cares about his characters, and he's taken care to depict them in a way that geeks will find sympathetic and (mostly) believable.
While a lot of Null's characters and situations were amusingly familiar, others rang less true. The Steve Williams character was a little too prone to making speeches about the relationship between bullies and their victims, for example, instead of just knocking Alex into the dirt the way the kids at my school would have done. There were also a few too many end-of-chapter "zinger" one-liners for my taste, and the novel uses the awkward device of a present-day journal talking about events that took place several years in the past.
Still, it's an impressive debut novel about an uncommon subject matter, and one I think a lot of Slashdotters would get a kick out of. Half Mast is a fast read, and an enjoyable one. It's also notable because the author chose to self-publish rather than go the traditional route. (Or maybe the topic was too "troublesome" for mainstream publishers in a post-Columbine world?)
You can purchase Half Mast from bn.com as well as from Null's own Web site at sutropress.com, which also has some excerpts from the book. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
he could have gotten even years later, like I do. When I see those jocks that used to oppress and torture me years ago in high school, I undertip them, and call the pizza shop to tell them it was cold.
I think of erectile disfunction.
Yay for Viagra!
.... I thought this was about a book called "Half Mast" describing the sadness of living with impotence. .... No offence intended.
ZERO
I use my superior wit and lack of qualms about homosexuality to cause disorder within their ranks by seducing their frat brothers.
As a computer geek, there are many other ways to settle the score without resorting to violence. It's always a shame when somebody who bothered me has all his work on the network drives corrupted, a spontaneous reboot just before saving... or floppy disks subject to magnetic disruption.
Oh... and the year I was the lab admin was the best, many of these jokers were in my class and the prof left me deal with them according - or just assumed that various events were just regular/random PC happenings.
Ah, the pleasant memories:
"These computer SUCK, this is the third time it's crashed before I could finish this assignment"
I'm betting the guy who simply runs every morning is going to last longer than the nerd and the guy who broke every major bone in his body playing football.
:)
Ironically, it's been calculated that if you jog for 30 minutes every day, you will live two years longer than everyone else. You will also have spent two years of your life jogging.
Remember all the experts on TV telling us that it's too many guns, not enough guns, religion, atheism, video games, sex education? Well none of those things have changed and the Columbines have disappeared. What's the only thing that has changed?
Dot coms.
They're gone - no sprees. Must've been the dot-coms fault...
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Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
"For some people, 2 + 2 = 22"
So people who forget to declare 2 to be a number instead of a string are considered crazy?
what's a mullet?
http://ratemymullet.com/