Who knew it was a new genre?

The Telegraph's Helen Brown looks at the burgeoning field of "high school massacre lit", talking to Lionel Shriver, the author of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (which is brilliant and must be read by everyone) about the impetus for that book and others like it:

Lionel Shriver wasn't in the cafeteria of Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 when Harris and Klebold opened fire. She never met them. Or the boys from Jonesboro, Springfield, Santee, Edinboro or Moses Lake. But people keep asking her why teenage boys take guns to school. Her devastating new novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, is a fictionalised account of a high-school massacre as narrated by the teenage killer's mother. Shriver had the perfect opportunity to explain it to us - and she didn't.

"It's getting really bizarre, unnerving," she told me, on a grey afternoon in London this week. I had spent the morning reading interviews she has given, and they don't play out like other writer profiles. People don't ask her about her remorseless prose or where she gets her characters from. Nobody asks about her favourite pen, or the authors she admires. All the interviewers act as if Eva and Kevin Khatchadourian are real people: they all ask her if it's Eva's fault that Kevin does what he does, or if he was just born evil. "I do know the secret," she says, "… it's that I made them up."

Also of note is Shriver's reaction to DBC Pierre's VERNON GOD LITTLE, pretty much echoing my own:

Has Shriver read Pierre's book? "You know," she sighs, "I started it and I couldn't take the voice. I just found it jarring and loud and overdone. I suppose that I shouldn't be bad-mouthing the competition but what the heck? I thought that awarding Vernon God Little the Booker Prize was extraordinary in the worst sense of word. That was clearly politically motivated - stirring the heated Bush-bashing and taking the mickey out of the United States in a very cheap way. It spoke to Brits as a real crowd-pleaser. We Need to Talk About Kevin is also pretty hard on the US - which is historically spoiled - but in a more nuanced, realistic way." The well-travelled Eva Khatchadourian passes on to her son a sense of superiority to the mainstream Happy Days fraudulence of American culture. "She thinks she can exempt herself, and of course you can't. I guess some of that comes from me too, having lived outside the US since 1987. Of course, hating America from within - especially from a Left-wing perspective - is as American as apple pie."