Eric Kahn Gale, co-creator of Team StarKid shows Little White Lie and Me and my Dick, has launched the hardcover edition of his debut novel The Bully Book and is going on a 7-date book tour to meet East Coast and Midwest readers. To promote the tour and the book’s release, he roped in some StarKid buddies to present a live reading on Youtube as well!
The Bully Book, aimed at readers 8 and up, tells the story of sixth-grader Eric Haskins. It’s a raw account of middle-school bullying, featuring perspectives from both the top and bottom of the school-yard food chain, as Eric discovers that he is The Grunt – the person whom the mysterious “Bully Book” instructs must be singled out as an absolute target in order for other students to rise above. Excerpts from the eponymous Bully Book itself address the reader like a textbook, informing the audience how to maintain a position of power, and when other students start to calculatedly torture Eric, he begins to discover the existence of the bullying manual, and his position as The Grunt, and he sets out to uncover the origins of the Bully Book and challenge it.
From Kirkus Reviews:
Eric’s quest to uncover the Bully Book is genuinely suspenseful. The juxtaposition of Eric’s journal against the Bully Book allows readers to see both the bullies’ methodology and Eric’s unwitting complicity. Gale gutsily portrays a gloves-off sixth-grade classroom in which variations of “gay” are flung around as insults (a usage that Eric articulately and bravely challenges). While it’s hard to imagine even the numbest substitute teacher routinely allowing a vocabulary lesson to become a bullying opportunity (“Eric Haskins is generally stupid”), the other adults in Eric’s life are convincingly ineffectual or self-deluded. A compelling and unusual look at a complex and intractable problem that succeeds admirably as story as well.
Gale states that, while the existence of the Bully Book is a fantastical element inspired by a young child’s interview about bullying, Eric’s story as a victim is so autobiographical that it was crucial that Gale give the character his own first name. “I called him Eric right from the start; it is so based in my life that it felt weird to call him anything else. I really wanted the autobiographical nature to shine through. The Bully Book being handed down through generations may be a flight of fancy, but almost all the instances of bullying–these all happened to me.”
Indeed, the content is such a raw portrayal of the cruelty of children that it was rejected from several publishers because it was too scary and dark, and didn’t have a test audience proving that it was something readers could cope with. Once Gale, with the help of Team StarKid, self-published the novel as an e-book in June 2011, he received a huge positive response, so The Bully Book was picked up by HarperCollins (who have listed it as a Top Ten Indie Next List pick of 2013) and released in stores as a hardcover on 26 December, 2012.
For those of you wondering how far the Team StarKid connection extends, The Bully Book was illustrated by StarKid co-founders and Nick and Matt Lang. Also, intriguingly, it has been stated by Gale to be set in the same “universe” as Little White Lie, and that the book’s sequel will tie into the YouTube series in some way.
Below, you can watch the book’s original 2011 release trailer and the recent hardcover trailer, both posted on the Team StarKid Youtube:
And here, you can watch Eric Kahn Gale, Lauren Lopez, Brian Holden and Matt Lang do a Google Hangout and live reading of The Bully Book. (Warning: it gets pretty emotional.)
From tomorrow, Eric Kahn Gale will be embarking on a 7-date tour for The Bully Book, visiting book stores and meeting with readers. You can catch him at one of the dates below:
January 8: Milwaukee WI, 7pm at Boswell Books
January 9: Dayton OH, 7pm at Books & Co
January 11: Cincinnati OH, 7pm at Joseph-Beth Booksellers
January 13: Alpharetta GA, 2pm at Barnes and Noble Alpharetta
January 15: Fairless Hills PA, 7pm at Barnes and Noble Fairless Hills
January 16: Greenwich CT, 7:30pm at Perrot Library
January 17: Naperville IL, 7pm at Anderson’s Bookshop
The Bully Book is available online at Barnes and Noble or Amazon, as well as in-store at Barnes and Noble and independent booksellers.