Hey Nostradamus!

Paperback edition cover
Author	Douglas Coupland
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Random House of Canada
Publication date	July 2, 2004
Publication place	Canada
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	244 pp
ISBN	1582344159

Hey Nostradamus! is a novel by Douglas Coupland, about a fictional 1988 school shooting in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia and its aftermath. This is Coupland's most critically acclaimed novel. It was first published by Random House of Canada in 2003.The novel comprises four first-person narratives, each from the perspective of a character directly or indirectly effected by the shooting. The novel intertwines substantial themes, including adolescent love, sex, religion, prayer and grief.

The novel follows the stories of victims of a fictional school shooting in North Vancouver in 1988. Coupland has expressed his concern that the killers of the Columbine received more focus then the victims; this is his story about the victims of tragedy. ^[1] The novel is told in four parts, each with a different narrator and focus.

The part of the book is told post-mortem by Cheryl, a girl who has been killed in the fictional school shooting at Delbrook Senior Secondary. Cheryl, from a purgatorial ante-place, recounts the events that lead up to the shooting, involving her secret trip to Las Vegas with her boyfriend Jason to be married. She also describes with a first person perspective what was happening in the cafeteria while the school shooting was taking place.

Cheryl describes her relationship to God, her relationship to her group of religious minded friends and their "Youth Alive!" group, and her relationship to her husband, Jason. She speaks about her life with a frank, open nature, not afraid of anything, as she is beyond the grave.

We also listen in to the prayers of people still in the incident, and of those thinking about the incident. It is explained that only prayers and swears have the ability to carry through to the afterlife. The text indents the prayers in the section, presenting them without interaction with Cheryl's character, as stand-alone external expressions of the incident.

During the shooting, Cheryl was stuck under a table at the center of the cafeteria. While the killers were moving their way through the crowd, one of the killers decides that he has had enough with the killing, and wants to stop. The other killers decide that he has become weak, and kill him. They then turn their attention to Cheryl and her friends, where Cheryl becomes the last casualty of the incident.

This section is a letter from Jason to his two nephews. In this section, we learn about what happened to Jason during and after the shooting at Delbrook. During the killing, Jason sees the killers running rampant, and finds a river rock in a planter and after the first killers turn of conscience, Jason throws the rock, killing one of the killers with the blow. However, he is too late to save Cheryl, who dies in his arms.

Discovered thus by the police, Jason is initially treated as a suspect: an additional level of tragedy for Jason, further intensified by the drive-by media 's sensationalistic exploitation of this mistake. As a result of this drive-by media treatment, the families in the school, including Cheryl's parents, believe Jason guilty and shun and abuse him: mistreatment which permanently harms the innocent Jason.

The letter then goes on to detail Jason’s subsequent life, and his undeserved fall. His brother, Kent, a leader in the Youth Alive! movement, has died. Kent, the older and loved brother, is preferentially regarded by their father, Reg.

Before the shooting incident, Jason was seen roughing up a Youth Alive! member, who was questioning Jason about his actions with Cheryl, whom Jason was secretly married to. The Youth Alive! group passed blame on Jason, claiming his change in attitude because of his marriage was actually because he was the fourth member of the killing trio. This idea is also picked and broadcast by the media.

When Jason arrives home from the shooting incident, the RCMP talk to Jason’s parents. They tell his parents that Jason is a hero for taking out on of the killers. His father, however, does not see it like this. Reg has an excessively legalistic Christianity, and reacts to the news that his son has taken a life with a harsh criticism, and a confusingly condescending reaction. Jason’s mother, in this moment, breaks down, and attacks Jason’s father, Reg. In this moment, Jason’s parent’s relationship undergoes a rupturing transformation that will never be reconciled.

Jason’s story continues from here, as he tries to deal with the facts that life has presented him. He enters into a dark world very different from where he expects to see himself. He enters into a set of black out moments near the end of his letter. He becomes disoriented and lost. When presented with another chance to kill in self-defense, Jason does not kill. He feels redemption by choosing life over death.

The secondary plot movement of the part involves the death of Kent. His funeral is a scene of a large fight between Kent’s widow, Barb, and Reg. The fight is based over whether or not twins both have souls. Reg says that one twin would be without a soul, which to Barb, the mother of twins, is appalling. This sends Reg into another dark spiral. Reg ends up at one point in the hospital, and only Jason goes to visit him there.

This part of the novel is narrated by Heather, a woman with whom Jason is eventually able to achieve trust and intimacy. Jason has gone missing, and Heather is keeping a journal to remember and deal with his loss.

In a vain search for Jason, Heather befriends a con-artist named Allison who fraudulently presents herself to Heather as a psychic in order to extort money in exchange for (false) news of Jason. Allison provides Heather with information that only Jason would have. Jason and Heather’s relationship began in a Toys’R’Us, with Jason purchasing toys for his nephews. Jason and Heather begin to create their own characters and stories for their characters, which is the information provided by Allison back to Heather.

Heather also talks about her relationship to Reg, who is undergoing fundamental changes due to the loss of both of his children. Heather’s interactions with Reg bring Reg back to a more humane Christianity, while bringing Heather to consider faith, where she had hitherto been staunchly against it.

Jason is still missing, and this part is narrated by Reg as a lament for his lost son. This section is told by Reg as an atonement for his previous actions as he has come to realize the faults in his particular belief system.

He is writing a letter to Jason which he is going to post on the trees around the forest, hoping his son reads the letter and comes home to him, realizing his father has undergone a transformation. The section, which climactically ends the book, is a paean of exultation.

Cheryl

Cheryl is the first narrator of the story. She is a young girl, in grade 12, who was murdered in the fictional school shooting at Delbrook Senior Secondary. She was separate from her family, as she was the only one to find religion. She was the last fatality caused by the killers before they were themselves killed. She narrates her section from a place between worlds, where only prayer and swear can reach. Jason and Cheryl are married in Las Vegas shortly before the incident at Delbrook.

Jason

A quiet child from a very religious family, Jason is the narrator of the second section of the novel. His father, Reg, is an intensely judgemental ultra-protestant, who favoured his older brother Kent.

Reg

Reg is the narrator of the fourth part of the novel. Born to a strict father, Reg turned to belief as his salvation. Creating a very strict religious code for himself, Reg married a woman and became the father to two children, Kent and Jason. Kent was his father’s child, following in his father’s religious footsteps. Throughout the novel, Reg undergoes a transformation from narrow fundamentalist to a more open and loving human being.

Jason’s mother

Jason’s mother married Reg when she thought she had found someone who believed in something. After Reg outcasts Jason, Jason’s mother leaves Reg, and takes Jason across Canada. She eventually succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease.

Kent

Jason’s older brother. He is a leader in the Youth Alive! movement, and looms over his brother as his father’s chosen son. Kent is married to Barb, and has two twin sons with her. He dies in the beginning of the second part from a car accident.

Barb

Kent’s wife, she is the mother of Kent’s twin sons, Jason’s nephews. After a fallout with Reg, she remains close to Jason until his disappearance. She is a different person from Kent in many ways, and is very different after the death of Kent.

Heather

Jason’s romantic partner in the latter half of the novel, Heather is the narrator of the third part of the novel. She is a woman who feels distant and is brought back into the world, just as she brings out Jason from his emotional seclusion. She creates characters and stories with Jason, which are later provided back to her by a psychic, who Heather believes will bring her back to the missing Jason.

Coupland began to write the novel in December, 2001, after a “nightmarish 40-city tour that began on 10 September”. ^[2] This tour took him across the United States and allowed him to experience the “collective sorrow” of the United States. ^[3] Coupland began to research the Columbine events after this experience.

'Some people say, how come you never explored the motives of the ones who did the shooting. To my mind, that was all people talked about. I'm very much a fan of JG Ballard, where you have people in this fantastically quotidian situation that goes suddenly wrong, and how people deal with that. Killers get too much press already. I remember growing up, the stories in which they live happily ever after, and the only part that I was interested was, like, after that. Well it was fun for a while then they broke up and she got into crystal meth, found religion and turned into a lesbian. That's the part I wanted to know. That's far more interesting to me.'

The quotation from Corinthians that opens the novel was found on a gravestone of one of the children who died in a high school shooting. ^[5]

An international best selling novel, the novel was received well by critics.

"One lesson I've learned is that you can never guess how a work will be received, … Curiously, The Rocky Mountain News, which is the daily that did the most intense documentation of the incident, and which is the one paper I might have been a bit tetchy about, gave the book an A-minus and told its readers that the memory of Columbine was respected, and in no way diminished or exploited. "My personal litmus test was that I didn't want any family member of a Columbine shooting to feel that their loss was being exploited.”

The novel was released the same week as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant was released, which also dealt with a Columbine like situation.

Coupland also had an art installation on the same topic, called “Tropical birds” which featured 3D versions of the kneeling figure from the front cover of Hey Nostradamus, and other scenes which features scenes from a school shooting like tragedy. ^[7]

• Book review from The Guardian

• Category:2003 novels
• Category:Novels by Douglas Coupland
• Category:Epistolary novels
• Category:Fiction narrated by a dead person
• Category:Vancouver in fiction

• Columbine High School massacre