Excerpt from How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The shooter is finished, except for the crust— eating the crust is unnatural, it's like eating the bones— and he wants to make a grand gesture when he leaves, give everyone in that room a story, so that years from now they can tell people that the day the shooting happened, they saw him. So they can say: I can't believe it could have been me. So they can say: I could tell something wasn't right with that kid, but I didn't think he'd do that. So they can say: If I could just go back and do it over again I would have stopped him. But you can't do things over again. That's the point. He wants them to understand the randomness of fate, to understand that he himself is fate personified, and he chose not to kill them, not because they're special or more important or better prepared or more faithful or more likable, but because there is no reason but unreason. He rises and goose- steps toward the exit, his heavy boots pounding a warning into the floor. At the door, he pivots on his heels and salutes the room. He holds this pose for a moment, whistling "Taps," and then lowers his hand deliberately, like the soldier standing before him and his mother at his father's funeral. He turns sharply on his heels and leaves the pizza shop.

He will not survive the shooting. Has no intention of surviving the shooting. There is no escape; anywhere he goes will be the same. He will run only so that they chase him.

His mother, drunk and alone at home, is watching TV and may not even know he has left the house. Next month, she will have a last meal of Canadian Club and onion rings and a hundred aspirin. Her boyfriend, Don, will be investigated for murder when they find the bruises on her arms, but he will have an airtight alibi. He will try to wring the most out of the low- level celebrity he gains from his association with the whole ugly mess, but in the end he will still be the same sad man he always was. In seventeen years Don will have a final meal of three saltines and some broth spoon- fed to him by the hospice nurse.

He pulls into the school parking lot. It is fourth period. Soon hundreds of his classmates will be herded into the cafeteria and they will fill themselves with fried food and they will be so loud. They think they have unlimited time and they think the things they care about matter but those things do not matter. The first shots will be fired in the cafeteria during lunchtime, and there will be explosives planted at the doors so anyone trying to escape will be exploded. He will stalk the halls, firing randomly through barricaded doors and catching the stragglers who are stuck without a hiding place. He will pull the fire alarm to make them think he set fire to the building and he will pick them off as they flee. The hero teacher will be shot through the lungs because this is not a world for heroes. This is a world for villains, this is a world for grand statements, not subtlety.

After the shooting, they will investigate his journals and his music and his web browsing history and they will try to paint a portrait that makes sense; they will shape a narrative around him that suggests the possibility of solutions. During the autopsy, they will find the pizza in his stomach, and they will find the residue of Adderall and Ritalin in his blood, and they will cut his brain open hoping to find some clue about what makes ­people like him exist, but they will find nothing besides what they always find. His brain is just another brain. It's connected to someone with a bad soul, but you can't bottle that or study it. The slivers of his brain placed on slides under a microscope will not show the memories, won't allow them to read the rejection and the emptiness and the abuse and the fear. The slides will not show the ways people can be ruined just by existing in the world. Shell- shocked acquaintances will say without irony that he had so much to live for, ignorant of the fact that the prospect of having to live like this for another fifty years was not the solution to but rather the cause of his hopelessness.

Excerpted from How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister. Copyright © 2018 by Tom McAllister. Excerpted by permission of Liveright / WW Norton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.