Death Game Links Story to Teenage Killers

DEATH GAME FOCUSES ON ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY AND MISPERCEPTION OF REALITY -- News Story in Posting Press

In the suspense/thriller Death Game, debut novelist Cheryl Swanson explores the mass psychology behind a worldwide teenage obsession—Internet games. In the novel’s opening chapters, fifteen-year-old Jimmie O’Brien is accused of shooting another teenager in connection with a violent and bigoted game carried on between unidentified players on the Internet.

Jimmie shares similarities with many teenage rampage killers, including Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the infamous Columbine school shootings, or (more recently) Jeffrey James Weise, who killed seven people at Red Lake High School in Minnesota in 2005. Weise created violent Flash animations and posted them on the Internet (including Newsgrounds) using the alias “Regret". One animation entitled Target Practice depicts the shooting of three people with an assault rifle, followed by blowing up a police car with a grenade.

Like Harris, Klebold and Weise, Jimmie O’Brien is presented as a lonely and somewhat isolated, prone to angry outbursts and obsessed with a violent fantasy world in cyberspace. What gives Death Game an interesting twist is that Jimmie does not appear to be abnormal, at least not to any parents of a modern teenager. He is presented as an idealistic, kind-hearted boy who is enraged by injustice. When a drunk driver escapes punishment after killing Jimmie’s parents in an automobile accident, Jimmie’s teenage angst explodes. But while Jimmie’s gaming partners are motivated by bigotry and specifically target Jews and other minorities in their killing games, Jimmie is simply trying to ease his rage and emotional pain.

Swanson sets the stage for the psychological thriller’s obligatory "analytical scene," by bringing in Jimmie’s clinical psychologist, a pony-tailed retired army colonel. Psychologist Nate Jordan explains to Jimmie’s sister, Cooper O’Brien, the appeal of total immersion in screen violence. When told that explicit, obsessional killing can also be a form of sexual titillation, Cooper responds: “For the first time I thought I understood why Jimmie had sat endlessly in front of his computer, pulling on a phallic-looking joystick with the empty-eyed look of someone whose spirit had been extracted out of his flesh.”

The book quickly progresses into twisted computer games, ‘closed cities’ and the religious extremism of terrorism. The almost-obligatory terrorist plot is unusual in that it is involves ordinary American human beings. “There are any number of thrillers about terrorism, but Death Game brings it into the living room, where it’s not about unidentified strangers but people we know,” said Elizabeth Burton, executive editor with Zumaya Publications.

Certainty of solution used to be a staple of detective fiction, but it is becoming more common for crime fiction to end as Death Game does, without very little completely resolved. The astute mystery reader can figure out what is left unsaid on their own, including whether Jimmie is really guilty. As Sherlock Holmes said: "Whatever remains, however improbable, must be truth" (from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles).

Death Game
Cheryl Swanson
Zumaya Publications
ISBN: 1554103258
Distributed by Ingram, Baker and Taylor
Suggested retail price: $14.99