author arrested(?) for novel about school shooting

Posted on: Tue, 09/02/2014 - 01:18 By: Tom Swiss

Write a novel about kids getting shot, get locked in the psych ward. Actually shoot a kid, and as long as he's black, well, you know.

In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist (The Atlantic)

A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—"taken in for an emergency medical evaluation" for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace's Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office, according to news reports from Maryland's Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future.