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As anybody who has been in that position knows, once the torment starts, it's nearly unstoppable. The boy was attacked with wet towels, knocked down several times, and bounced against a locker. Not even the teacher's assistant would come to his aid. "Dear God, please get me out of here," young Peretti prayed frantically. "Please don't let them do this to me."

But no answer was forthcoming. "[E]very authority figure in his life said he had to be here," Peretti writes of himself. "He had to go to school, do his chores, finish the homework, keep his shoes tied, go to bed and get up at certain hours, eat his vegetables, and be here. End of discussion."

He wanted to lash out at his tormentors, to even the score. Both his size and his faith constrained him, but Peretti always wondered what would have happened without such constraints.

Like Peretti, Harris and Klebold were outcasts picked on by classmates. They both looked and acted differently from those around them. Like Peretti, they developed strange obsessions; he with monsters, they with shock rock and Charles Darwin. He labels them and others like them "wounded spirits" and doesn't flinch from applying the label to himself. Yet he suffered through and went on to some semblance of normal life while they flamed out in a most spectacular fashion. Why? And why did "wounded spirits" of the past not resort to mass murder?

The short answer is that Peretti "knew a Savior who taught us to turn the other cheek and forgive" while Harris and Klebold presumably didn't. But he still needs to wrestle with the larger reality that something restrained past potential Harrises and Klebolds. To make sense of this restraint, he wrote the most awkward-fitting (and perhaps the best) chapter of the book, "The Playground Parable," but when all is said and done, Peretti proposes that schools ought to have a zero-tolerance teasing policy and restructure gym class to stress individual fitness instead of competition. This is not Peretti at his best.

Perhaps the problem is the nature of the book. Biography, preaching, and storytelling are mixed together at odd angles to create a less than satisfying whole. Several chapters attempt to show what high school is like for outsiders. Others attempt to give Aesop a run for his money. It has snippets of self-help talk mixed with biblical quotations and movie references sprinkled throughout. Peretti even dares to hope in the final chapter, "A Fresh Start," that "Maybe we're entering an era in which bullying and the intimidation of other people are at last consigned to their rightful place alongside racism, hatemongering," and several other Very Bad Things. It's such a beautiful dream that I'd hate to argue with it.

Here's a more interesting question Peretti could answer when he writes his formal autobiography: What positive role has suffering played in his life? While he speaks of suffering inhibiting him from making good choices, it is also possibly the greatest source of his success.

The mistreatment he suffered gave him a special interest in monsters, a longing for justice, and a special sensitivity to the problem of evil and its otherworldly manifestations. These are the same traits that make his novels bestsellers. That may be but a small comfort, given what he was put through, but it is a comfort nonetheless. Readers might benefit from seeing Peretti wrestle with the fact that his wounded spirit was uniquely able to bring reading pleasure to so many.

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March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4