Totally obsessed with Columbine

Ten years is a long time to work on the same story, especially one so grueling, but the freelance journalist found himself unable to walk away.

"I thought I was done," Cullen says from his home in Denver. "I was like, 'No more dead children, ever. I'm going to write about happy things for awhile.' But things kept sucking me back in. I wanted to know why the killers did it. I got more and more frustrated. 'Why don't we know?' I'd think. The answers we had were ridiculous: A feud with the Trench Coat Mafia or the story that the boys were loners and outcasts. I was always a little skeptical that someone had bombs to kill 500 people because of that. It just didn't ring true."

In "Columbine" (Twelve, $26.99), Cullen, who has written for Salon.com, Slate.com and The New York Times, addresses the rumors and outright untruths that surfaced in the wake of the shootings and presents a fascinating portrait of the victims, the killers and a community. Though he was one of the reporters who regularly broke the stories _ he was first to report that the repeated rumor that Cassie Bernall had testified to her faith before dying was untrue _ he maintains a third-person narrative for clarity's sake.

"I was so impressed by the depth of his reporting and his commitment to getting the story right," says Twelve publisher Jonathan Karp, who asked Cullen to write "a short book" about the shootings almost 10 years ago. "I also don't think I've ever read a more compelling account of a descent into madness and malevolence. His ability to recreate the mindset of these two killers in the year leading up to the massacre is truly remarkable. ... He sacrificed in terms of psychic cost, too, for getting inside the heads of people most of us would not want in our lives."

Cullen, who was treated for post-traumatic stress syndrome while covering the story, writes compassionately about the families scarred by death or severe injury, and the reactions of the young survivors engaged him deeply. He's still haunted by the day after the shootings, when so many of them gathered in nearby Clement Park.

"I wasn't expecting all those kids to have these blank expressions," Cullen says. "If you've been in a theater with a young audience, you see them tugging each other's hair, laughing, all kinds of horseplay. There's a teenage nervous energy you can feel. In that park with a thousand kids, there was no energy coming out of them. Just silence. These kids were like walking zombies, and that unnerved me."

Cullen "didn't feel right asking them anything," but when he finally approached a group of boys, he discovered they wanted to talk.

"They said, 'I have no more tears. I cried til 2 a.m., and it stopped suddenly.' Or 'I had to get away from my mom. She was trying to hug me too much.' They all had similar stories. They knew they were shut down. You know that David Bowie song "Changes" and the line 'They're quite aware of what they're going through'? These kids knew what they were going through but didn't know how to cure it. ... I was impressed by them but worried about them. ... In the movie 'Elephant,' Gus Van Sant's film based on the shootings, there was not a single intelligent thing said by a teenager. The underlying premise of the movie was that high-school kids are banal, and they don't have anything to say. All the conversations were superficial. That is the opposite of what I found. Anyone who has kids or has spent time with kids knows there's a lot of silliness but a lot of insight and wisdom."

Structuring the book with its numerous story lines _ the kids, the killers, the cops, the media, the reaction of local churches _ was a headache. Cullen tried to remember that his audience would need a break from the relentlessly grim chapters and balanced them with rare upbeat stories, such as the recovery of Patrick Ireland, who survived the carnage in the library.

Cullen also struggled with the writing. The chapters on Coach Dave Sanders, who was shot and bled to death as S.W.A.T. teams painstakingly swept the school, thinking the gunmen were still alive, were the hardest, he says: "I was crying when I was writing it. I couldn't see the screen. I was just typing blind. I could only stand it for so many minutes a day."

A more surprising difficulty arose when he tried to write about Klebold's funeral. On one hand, Cullen felt that writing from the killers' perspectives, using their journals and videos, "wasn't disturbing. It was like looking at disease under a microscope." He listened to the hardcore music Harris liked and tried to watch Klebold's favorite movie, David Lynch's "Lost Highway" _ "I couldn't even finish it" _ and otherwise attempted to immerse himself in their dark world. But the funeral scene stymied him.

"I couldn't understand it, even though I was sympathetic to the parents," Cullen says. "I went to see my shrink, and ...

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