Hey Nostradamus!

The novel follows the stories of victims of a fictional school shooting in North Vancouver in 1988. Coupland has expressed his concern that the killers of the Columbine High School massacre received more focus than the victims; this is his story about the victims of tragedy.[1] The novel is told in four parts, each with a different narrator and focus.

Cheryl

Cheryl is the first narrator of the story. She is a young grade 12 student, who is a victim of the infamous Delbrook Secondary School massacre. Cheryl grew up in a non-religious environment but becomes religious, through her pursuit of Jason. Her family follows an agnostic mentality, and dislike Cheryl's newfound faith. Cheryl is the last fatality, before Jason storms in, and kills Mitchell with a blunt round object. Cheryl narrates between her former life, and oblivion. Jason and Cheryl wed in Las Vegas, using fake IDs purchased by Jason. She informs Jason that she is pregnant with his child, just a few hours before the massacre occurs.

Jason

A quiet and rebellious child from a very religious family. Jason is the narrator of the second section of the novel. His father, Reg, is self-righteous, zealous, and unapologetic, and seems to favour his older brother Kent.

Reg

Reg is the narrator of the fourth part of the novel. Born to a strict father, Reg turned to belief as his salvation. Creating a very strict religious code for himself, Reg married and became the father to two children, Kent and Jason. Kent was his father's child, following in his father's religious footsteps. Throughout the novel, Reg undergoes a transformation from narrow fundamentalist to a more open and loving human being.

Jason's mother

Jason's mother married Reg when she thought she had found someone who believed in something. After Reg outcasts Jason, Jason's mother leaves Reg, and takes Jason across Canada. She eventually succumbs to Alcohol-Induced Dementia.

Kent

Jason's older brother. He is a leader in the Youth Alive! movement, and looms over his brother as his father's chosen son. Kent is married to Barb, and has two twin sons with her. He dies in the beginning of the second part from a car accident.

Barb

Kent's wife, but she is the mother of Jason's twin sons, therefore Kent's nephews. She and Kent tried to have kids but it didn't work. Since she was desperate to have kids, and Kent dies, she forces Jason to have kids with her. Since, she wanted her kids to look like they're Kent's and her child, so she has sex with Jason so that there are chances of her child looking like Kent. After a fallout with Reg, she remains close to Jason until his disappearance. She is a different person from Kent in many ways, and is very different after the death of Kent.

Heather

Jason's romantic partner in the latter half of the novel, Heather is the narrator of the third part of the novel. She is a woman who feels distant and is brought back into the world, just as she brings out Jason from his emotional seclusion. She creates characters and stories with Jason, which are later provided back to her by a psychic, who Heather believes will bring her back to the missing Jason.

Coupland began to write the novel in December 2001, after a "nightmarish 40-city tour that began on 10 September".[2] This tour took him across the United States and allowed him to experience the "collective sorrow" of the United States.[2] Coupland began to research the Columbine events after this experience.

Some people say, how come you never explored the motives of the ones who did the shooting. To my mind, that was all people talked about. I'm very much a fan of JG Ballard, where you have people in this fantastically quotidian situation that goes suddenly wrong, and how people deal with that. Killers get too much press already. I remember growing up, the stories in which they live happily ever after, and the only part that I was interested was, like, after that. Well it was fun for a while then they broke up and she got into crystal meth, found religion and turned into a lesbian. That's the part I wanted to know. That's far more interesting to me.

— Coupland in The Observer[2]

The quotation from Corinthians that opens the novel was found on a gravestone of one of the children who died in a high school shooting.[1]

An international best-selling novel, the novel was received well by critics.

One lesson I've learned is that you can never guess how a work will be received, … Curiously, The Rocky Mountain News, which is the daily that did the most intense documentation of the incident, and which is the one paper I might have been a bit tetchy about, gave the book an A-minus and told its readers that the memory of Columbine was respected, and in no way diminished or exploited. My personal litmus test was that I didn't want any family member of a Columbine shooting to feel that their loss was being exploited.

— Coupland in The Globe and Mail[3]

The novel was released the same week as Gus Van Sant's film Elephant, which also dealt with a Columbine-like situation.

Coupland also had an art installation on the same topic, called "Tropical Birds", which featured 3D versions of the kneeling figure from the front cover of Hey Nostradamus!, and other pieces which features scenes from a school shooting tragedy.[4]

• McCampbell, Mary (2009) "'God is nowhere; god is now here': The Co-existence of Hope and Evil in Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus!" in The Yearbook of English Studies, 39(1-2), pp. 137–154.

• Columbine High School massacre
• Delbrook Senior Secondary School

• Book review from The Guardian