Hitchcock needs Mcguffins, Kirk needs tribbles. Still, all that risk, chaos, danger, and darkness… those are engines which drive stories.

Mostly, I veered away from the dark stuff. But every time I found a laugh, I could also scratch the surface and see loss, pain, fear, general existential horror, and cruel insanity.

I was constantly on the look-out for the funny. With I Kill the Mockingbird I wanted to write a comedy. Laughter is to story-stuff as Geiger counter is to uranium. I Kill the Mockingbird is a comedy about friends, first kisses, so-called great literature, social media, patron saints, and the weird, wonderful and unexpected ways that books change our lives. The cops might be on the friends’ trail, and a Mockingbirdpalooza is about to break out in the park downtown. Books are disappearing from stores and libraries around the country. Wil Wheaton, Neil Gaiman and Chuck Wendig are tweeting about it. Soon – thanks to a bit of “literary terrorism” plus Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and a life-sized Santa Claus doll dressed up as an ax murderer – the conspiracy to promote reading, dubbed I KILL THE MOCKINGBIRD, is not only successful, it’s out of control. Just the same, the three friends agree to work together on a scheme to honor their dead English teacher by making as many people as possible want to read the Harper Lee novel. Michael thinks the classic is about “a little white tomboy who worships her father in a town filled with whacky racist Christians and lynch-mob farmers.” Meanwhile, Elena is sure that Charlotte’s Web is truly the best novel ever written. In Lucy’s opinion, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is the greatest book of all time. “What if we could make everybody read To Kill a Mockingbird this summer?” Lucy asks her friends. They’ve also got more pragmatic concerns like the assigned reading list distributed on the last day of school, which includes To Kill a Mockingbird. As they face the summer before high school, they contemplate the tricky changes happening all around them including Lucy’s mom’s recent victory over cancer, the death of a beloved English teacher, and Michael and Lucy’s budding romance. The three – all book lovers – have just finished eighth grade. I Kill the Mockingbird is a middle grade novel about Lucy Jordan and her two best friends, Elena Vallejo and Michael Buskirk.

I Kill the Mockingbird by Paul Acampora