Speaker 1: Hi. This is Shaun David Hutchinson and I am the editor of Violent Ends. I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book and then I'll share an excerpt with you.

With Violent Ends, I wanted to tell the story of a young man who brings a gun to school and shoots his classmates. I wanted to examine whether the shooter was a boy who at some point became a monster, or a monster who had just been pretending to be a boy. But I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of the people who had known him. So I asked a group of writers I admired if they'd be willing to help me and together we built the world of Violent End. It's a book that has no easy answers, but one that I hope will get readers thinking about the right questions. And now I am going to read an excerpt to you.

This is from my short story The Perfect Shot.

I wait for the perfect shot. Mrs. Racupido says that patience is more important for a great photographer to master than proper use of lighting, exposure or framing. Good photographers, she says, takes thousands of pictures hoping they'll be lucky enough to capture just one beautiful frozen moment in time. But great photographers are willing to hunch down in the heat, their backs aching, sweat pooling in the uncomfortable folds of their skin, while mosquitoes suck their blood, or bullets explode around them, for that one perfect shot.

I don't know his name or why I chose him as the subject of my photography project. There are more interesting students at Middleboro High, quite a few who are better looking. I've passed him in the hallway before and never noticed anything particularly special about him and yet cameras never lie. When I view him through the lens of my camera, a Nikon D810 I splurged on with the money Nona left me when she died, I don't see a boy who sometimes sits alone at lunch and sometimes eats a bologna and mustard sandwich. I see the boy I might have been.