Macromere Press

Macromere: Why Andrew Kehoe, the seventh ghost encountered in He Who Shall Remain Shameless? 

David: This particular story went through a lot of changes. A whole slew of rewrites. Two things remained constant, though: the opening sentence—“I was on campus to stop a massacre”—and the fact that the story takes place at the end of September, “goodbye-to-Maggie-May time”. Other than that, the first draft of “Andrew” wasn’t called “Andrew” at all. It was entitled “Tuma”, a word or name I’d picked up while living overseas, and the first draft didn’t have a ghost but rather a real-life, flesh-and-blood active shooter on a college campus. This active shooter was unnamed and unidentifiable, a kind of EveryKiller. The title was a throwaway, indicative more of the idea propelling the piece than anything. But early on that was David’s mission—to stop this active shooter from shooting up the campus. In this early, very rough version I was going for satire bar-none, to the point where the narrator brings a cache of loaded guns onto campus and tries to distribute them to terrified students, urging them to take up arms and shoot the active shooter before they are shot. Did this version work? Absolutely not. It was all about the idea, and the idea was arch, overly political and, frankly, not very interesting. What I needed was a person, a ghost, an historical figure that would fit with the rest of HWSRS. I wanted to keep the campus setting and the premise, but I didn’t feel comfortable writing about Seung-Hui Cho [the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007], and no way was I going to touch Columbine. I decided to look back….

M: And you came up with Kehoe, who remains the worst campus mass murderer in American history.

D: I know what you’re getting at: The other spirits in He Who Shall Remain Shameless are more benign…or at the very least David is trying to save them, help them, whereas he’s not so much helping Andrew Kehoe as he is helping the people of Bath, Michigan. So “Andrew” remains a bit of an anomaly compared to the other stories in the novel…it was always going to stand apart somewhat. But it works—

M: It does work.

D: It really is a major turning point in the novel. In “Andrew” the reader meets David’s crucial companion, the All-In-One Ishmael, for the first time, and the forward momentum of the final showdown with the Meritocrat is fully realized.

M: How much research did you do, when you’d finally decided on Andrew Kehoe for your subject?

D: A substantial amount of research. I wanted to get it right, and above all I wanted to make the story about the victims, the citizens of Bath as well as Kehoe. A primary source was “The Bath School Disaster”, a book written shortly after the tragedy by MJ Ellsworth. One website in particular, run by a descendant of one of the victims of the May 18, 1927 school bombing, was a great help. Reading the names and bios of all the children and adults who had perished that day really took “Andrew” to the level it needed to reach….the story found an emotional core.