Pros: Interesting look at how American culture is breeding a younger criminal.
Cons: The book lacks the intensity of the movie it has inspired.
The Bottom Line: Fast paced and informative, Schutze writes the ideal true crime novel. One that is informative and yet entertaining enough to hold a reader's attention.
Trotterman's Full Review: Jim Schutze - Bully: A True Story of High School R...
One of the sad truths about America today is that we often hear nothing about books until they have inspired a film. Then when you want to buy the book, you have to put up with this stupid movie tie-in cover. Oooh! I hate movie tie-in covers!
Another sad commentary on today's society is that our criminals, in particular our killers, are become younger and more detached from their actual crimes. One may not be able to find a more perfect example of this than Jim Schutze's true-crime story "Bully: The Story of High School Revenge." This story is gaining some notoriety as director Larry Clark ("Kids" "Gummo") has made the story into a film starring most notably Brad Renfro ("The Client" "Apt Pupil").
The story is primarily one of revenge. Bobby Kent is the smart and popular kid in school who gets his pleasure out of the abuse of others. That abuse includes the emotional torture and physical abuse of mentally disabled people, the rape of teenage girls, and the prolonged emotional and physical abuse of his best friend Marty Puccio.
Marty is everything that Bobby is not. He never finished high school. He is brooding and withdrawn where Bobby can be charismatic and outgoing. His brutal nature only comes out when around Bobby, but he can never stand up to the boy who has been his best friend for years. This all begins to change when he meets Lisa.
Lisa is your standard high school wallflower. Never very attractive or popular, when Marty shows some level of interest in her, she becomes emotionally attached to him very quickly. She forgives his verbal and, at times, physical abuse. She blames his violent nature on Bobby. She hates to see the way Bobby treats the boy she loves. She decides the only way to end this whole ordeal for she and Marty is to kill Bobby Kent.
So begins a whirlwind that will eventually involve Lisa, Marty and five or their friends. The group is heavily into drugs, drinking and video games. All the vices of America's youth combine to make these six All-American members of suburbia turn into stone cold killers.
The story Schutze is trying to tell is important because this is not a case of gang members killing each other off. These are kids from middle and upper class families. These are white kids from the suburbs. This is a new kind of crime that America wasn't ready for when it happened in 1993 in Florida. This is the kind of crime that America probably still isn't ready for. We don't want to admit that these kind of kids can commit these kind of crimes. Schutze not only proves they can, but they can do it with a detachment from feeling that is, to put it mildly, disturbing.
Bobby is savagely stabbed, slashed and beaten as he begs his best friend for forgiveness and mercy. The decision to kill him was made with a nonchalance that could chill the blood of history's more notorious killers. The only area of crime these kids didn't have down cold was the coverup. They folded like a house of cards. They told anyone who would listen. This was because they never expected to get caught. Even when they were caught, a surreal feeling of disbelief can over them, their families and society. How could these kids do this?
Well, it must be some outer influence. These were good kids. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It must be someone else's fault. These ideas were put forth over and over again by the culprits, their parents and their lawyers. A feeling along those lines must have struck a cord with jurors. Of the seven killers, only Marty Puccio received a death penalty sentence for a murder that was planned out with cold-blooded precision. Even Marty's sentence has since been reduced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years.
As I noted earlier. Schutze has written a fascinating look at a new kind of crime, but he has fallen victim to having his words set to film by a very intense film maker. Larry Clark took a most disturbing story, and was able to make it worse. That said, this was an excellent piece of journalism by Schutze. It moved along at a very good pace, a characteristic not always applicable to true crime. He did not get bogged down by meticulous detail, yet at no time is the writing lacking or irresponsible.
This book is a very good companion to the film. It gives a bit more background than the film. The trial is more fully drawn out. We only get one very disturbing scene from a preliminary hearing in the film. Schutze does a better job of showing us the environment these kids grew up in. He shows us how they may have been detached from any feeling or remorse long before the idea of killing Bobby Kent entered anyone's mind. Schutze does a pretty good job of scaring even the most privileged members of America's suburbs back into reality. This is a new world we're living in. Better be nice to the kids.
For years, Bobby Kent terrorized his high school classmates with cruel acts of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. Eventually his victims had e...More at Buy.com
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