Gone Boy
A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
On December 14, 1992, Gregory Gibson’s eighteen-year-old son Galen was murdered, shot in the doorway of his college library by a fellow student gone berserk. The killer was jailed for life, but for Gibson the tragedy was still unfolding. The morning of the shooting, he learned, college officials had intercepted but not stopped a box of ammunition addressed to the murderer. They were also anonymously warned of the intended killing but failed to call the police. After years of frustrated attempts to find peace, Gibson woke one morning to a terrible vision of his own rage and helplessness. He knew he had to do something before he destroyed himself, and he resolved to discover and document the forces that led to Galen’s death.
Gone Boy follows Gibson as he visits the gun seller, as well as detectives, lawyers, psychiatrists, politicians, and college bureaucrats— a cast of characters as vivid as those in a Raymond Chandler mystery. Hailed by the New York Times and others for its evocative style and courage in confronting guns, violence, and manhood in America today, this wrenching memoir speaks in the voice of a man struggling to turn grief and rage into acceptance and understanding.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The recent rash of school shootings makes Gibson's heartbreaking book as timely as it is good. Shortly before Christmas in 1992, an alienated, angry student named Wayne Lo went on a shooting rampage at Simon's Rock College in western Massachusetts, wounding four people and killing two, one of whom was Gibson's 18-year-old son, Galen. While grieving, Gibson embarked on what he calls a "walkabout," a search for the truth about his son's death: "I would concentrate on the details, the facts, and trust that their greater meaning would emerge, of its own accord, in the end. It never occurred to me to doubt that there was a greater meaning." At first, there was Lo's trial to occupy him, followed by a civil suit against the college. Gibson writes honestly about the rage that consumed him for the first few years after Galen's death. In a remarkable chapter, he describes a conversation with Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, which owns Simon's Rock, in which he realized that assigning blame would serve no practical or spiritual purpose. Not that human fallibility didn't play a huge role in Galen's death: Gibson makes a compelling argument that Simon's Rock administrators had more than enough warning signs to prevent the tragedy. Lo's high-school teachers knew he was troubled. So did his college teachers. And his college friends and administrators knew he had a gun and ammunition. What makes this book special, and what distinguishes it from the blizzard of 30-second explanations and 800-word op-ed pieces on teen violence, is the way in which Gibson transcends his rage and becomes capable of mounting a searching, informative and ultimately deeply moving exploration into the combination of causality and randomness that surrounds his son's death.
Customer Reviews
Grief
Gone Boy is a touching book that personally was extremely relatable for many hyper specific reasons I haven't seen properly elaborated on correctly until now.
One of those being how people miss signs, misconstrue words, actions, and people different from them.
Much like Wayne, the murderer who would kill Galen Gibson, the authors son, I too was in and had a friend group much like described as Wayne's in high school. No one really understood us, we disdained the fakeness at times of our liberal arts high school classmates. Thus we were often challenging the status quo with our edgy ironic humor that like Wayne's friend group. However often times this was cloudy and sometimes we weren't really sure if our fellow friends actually believed the things we would say. This is why you need to keep your friends close, and check in on them.
Much has changed since 1992 compared to 2023. The way we talk about mental health in todays society is at times unrecognizeable when reading certain passages of the book.
I'm not sure if we ever will know if Wayne truly suffered from short term psychosis or a personality disorder, but the terminology here in the book and even during the trial makes me wonder how if in todays society we might of viewed Wayne's crime in regards to mental illness. Especially regarding suicide and violence. In reality as Gregory writes, Wayne is the gone boy. It's a tear worthy injustice about todays society
And of course Gregory writes undeniable truth in this book about grief. It's a walkabout. You stumble, you fall, get close to falling into that deep hole, but eventually you find the right path and just do whats right for you to process extreme events like this. You almost come full circle. The only thing you can do when down is to go up. And sometimes for those like Gregory it involves understanding almost every single factor that went wrong in a tragic event, even the people.