After Francine Prose Fear

Since 2013, there have been over 200 school shootings in the United States. These shootings have had a major impact on society, and people's personal views on gun control. But, many people don’t hear much about how they affect kids around and in the school. This book focuses on the impact of a school shooting on a neighboring school as well as on the students' everyday lives. The main character, Tom Bishop, is helpless as he sees his school start to enact rules so harsh it begins to feel like a prison. In the novel After, Francine Prose uses fear and suspense to illustrate the dark reality of school shootings.
Perhaps the greatest element in After is its use of fear. When the school only 50 miles away from Tom's becomes the victim of a school …show more content…
The way the new counselor, who soon takes over as Principal, enforces these new rules is through his use of fear. The first time Tom starts to experience this fear is when he hears of random locker searches, and just to be safe he goes to check his. He is so scared they will find something that he says, "I was hardly breathing when I opened my locker door. All right! Fine! I exhaled," (Prose 83). No one in the novel understands what is happening, and the parents are being brainwashed by the nightly emails they receive from the school. Tom gets so scared he eventually admits, "Half of me wanted to burst into tears and beg them to help me, get me out of there, do something before Dr. Willner sent me to Operation Turnaround and they never see me again," (Prose 252). Operation Turnaround is the rehab camp that the school sends kids to that cause problems or break school rules. It is feared because the kids who get sent there never return or are heard from again. Even one of Tom's best friends, Silas, gets sent away and no one can contact him for the rest of the story. People who get sent to Operation Turnaround almost …show more content…
It illustrated the lives of those who are affected by school shootings very well. Prose’s use of fear and suspense created a dark feeling from the reader. The story had some flaws, such as not really giving Tom a personal life and only talking about his life at school, but other than that the story was very compelling. With school shootings happening so often today, the story really opens the reader’s eyes. Francine Prose did a great job of describing and having the antagonist enact the harsh rules that followed the shooting. The story does a great job showing the line between rules for safety and rules that go against people’s

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