Yesterday, I finished this book. It ended with a mass shooting.
Several people had recommended Dean Koontz to me over the years, and I finally thought, hey, I’ve already tried all the drugs I’m going to do. Why not give him a shot?
And Koontz’s writing, although sometimes flowery and rigid, is its own kind of drug. I felt tuned in, sucked in and invested in a way I haven’t felt with a book for a long time.
“Odd Thomas” is about an earnest fry cook who can see dead people. He breaks into buildings, hides a body and discovers a Satanic cult in his hometown. It’s great.
Still, after I finished his novel, I wondered if Dean Koontz would have included a shooting if he was crafting the same book today. The terror of last night’s massacre in Las Vegas is a reminder that these horrific events have become so commonplace that news orgs have facts and figures on mass shootings ready to go, like a celebrity’s obituary.
“Odd Thomas” was published in 2003, about a decade before the Sandy Hook shooting, which had all the elements of a dam-breaking moment. The shooting that left 26 dead was the point where someone could literally massacre children and their teachers in a place of learning, with little to no consequence. Policies that would prevent a similar shooting didn’t really gain traction, and the shootings haven’t stopped.
In fact, considering last night’s shooting and last year’s shooting in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people were killed, we can’t ignore that this problem is getting worse.
The Sandy Hook shooting didn’t change what we do, with the exception of expensive school security improvements, which school districts usually pay for themselves. What has changed is that mass shootings have become blasé. We’ve extracted emotion from them to the extent that the same routine plays out every time with little introspection.
It goes like this: Politicians on both sides of the aisle send out “thoughts and prayers” to the victims and their loved ones. Then there are arguments for and against tighter gun control laws, followed by calls for better mental health care. At this point, some of us bring in the background of the shooter and use it to determine whether or not we should call what happened “terrorism.” By the way, we don’t agree on whether or not a mass shooting is considered terrorism if the shooter is white.
We usually learn more about the shooter later on, and more times than not, it turns out that there were red flags surrounding him, warnings that he needed help or intervention – something more than nothing.
This process has always rolled out like clockwork in the days and weeks after a shooting. But now it takes hours instead of weeks to play through the whole repertoire. It feels like a reflex. Maybe we’ve done it so many times before, we already know what to say and how to say it. Maybe we are numb and there’s no way to give the pain and loss more thought than we already have, thought that would lead to action. After all, what happened in Las Vegas is staggering, but it’s part of a larger trend of almost-daily mass shootings. How can we not be numb?
After I finished “Odd Thomas,” I wondered if Dean Koontz ever regrets using this tragedy that we live with as a plot point. I thought about the active shooter trainings we go to at our workplaces, schools and churches. I thought about how I’d never be prepared for a situation like that. I’m never prepared for the heartbreak of just reading about it.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org.