Novel Bad Reputation takes on bullies

By BRUCE INGRAM Contributor

One thing really bugged screenwriter-turned-novelist Matt Hader when he was growing up and going to school in Park Ridge. He hated seeing kids being bullied. “Almost everyone has wit-nessed someone being bullied while growing up,” the Maine South grad said. “It’s not exactly an isolated problem. It always really bothered me, though. Always. It would eat at me and I would eventually call people out who were doing it. “But I also always wondered: What is going on in the mind of the person who’s being bullied? Do they just give up and go hide somewhere? Or are they perhaps quietly plotting some revenge?” After percolating for a couple of decades, that idea has developed into Hader’s first novel, Bad Reputation. ThinkBox Publishing of Vancouver will release the book this week on paperback and as a download from all standard e-book platforms including amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, Kindle and iTunes. The dark comedy is a story of long-gestating vengeance exacted by one John Caul, of Balmoral, Illinois, a fictional version of Barrington, where Hader and wife Lori currently reside. Already a target of bullies in high school, John became universally despised in Balmoral at the age of 17 when he accidentally burned the town’s pride and joy to the ground: A brand new gymnasium built as a shrine to the town’s championship basketball team. Which immediately slipped into a 20-year losing streak. Ever since, John has been ostracized by the townsfolk, who have given him the affectionate nickname of Sparky. He lives alone in the tiny, post-WWII home of his deceased parents, surrounded by McMansions, and refuses to clean the eggs that town teens routinely throw at the house. Hader describes the layers of dried eggs as “proud battle scars” that “made John’s house appear as if it was a guano-covered rock in the middle of a tree-lined, suburban paradise.” John has a plan, though, for payback, involving a series of armed robberies and anonymous donations to save the town’s annual, recently canceled, Fourth of July Festival. “He’s an antihero,” Hader said. “He’s a little delusional. He’s not the most normal guy around. And when you first meet him, he’s robbing someone. But you start rooting for him because you eventually understand why he’s doing what he’s doing.” Comedy runs in Hader’s family. One of his brothers, Rick Hader, is also known as Myron Noodleman, “the clown prince of baseball,” and his nephew, Bill Hader, Jr., is a “Saturday Night Live” cast member who regularly appears in movies. Uncle Matt has also been working in Hollywood for the past 20 years as a screenwriter, though the bulk of his writing has gone into what he calls the “R&D” aspect of the industry, which produces only one out of 40 scripts that are developed. “It’s a strange, strange business,” he said. Hader said he always knew that he wanted to write stories, but he didn’t know what form that would take until after he left Oklahoma State University in 1980 to train at Second City and work in Chicago radio for a few years. After moving back to Oklahoma, he took a day job as a 911 dispatcher (Hader is currently working on a novel based on that experience), and eventually started writing screenplays on spec. When he finally optioned his ninth script, he quit and began writing screenplays full time. Dark comedy is a specialty, he said, including an independent comedy he wrote and produced in 2004 called “Dead Horse,” about four salesmen in a failing carpet store — and a plot involving murder. “I like writing dark comedy because nothing in this world is black and white,” he said. “At least, that’s the way I see things, for better or worse. Everything is pretty gray.”