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2 books get into the twisted minds of the Columbine killers

What was it about Columbine?

Of all the school shootings over the past two decades, it’s the one that festers, an ugly wound that won’t heal.

Now two journalists try to understand the incomprehensible as the 10th anniversary of Columbine nears.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, entered their high school in Littleton, Colo., and shot and killed 12 students and one teacher. They didn’t come away with the highest body count, even though they had hoped to blow up the school with bombs that never went off. Seung-Hui Cho holds that sad distinction with 32 victims at Virginia Tech.

But there was something so gruesome about what Eric and Dylan did — taunting the helpless students they shot in the school library before killing themselves — that the memory of that horrific day is hard to shake.

Dave Cullen’s “Columbine” is the more ambitious and ultimately compelling take on the tragedy. He tries hard to get inside the heads of Eric and Dylan, writing in teen-speak that allows us to inhabit their twisted points of view.

Cullen succeeds in making us “get” Eric. He was a rage-filled psychopath who hated the world. “Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it,” Cullen writes. “For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art.”

Dylan is a tougher nut to crack. Depressed, suicidal, a misfit convinced he’ll never find love, he latches on to Eric in a kind of desperate ennui. Cullen nearly makes us sympathize with Dylan.

But Jeff Kass, a reporter for the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, casts a harsher light on Dylan. He opens his straightforward “Columbine: A True Crime Story” with a chilling account of what happened in the library. You can’t read it and feel anything but revulsion for Dylan. Kass’ book also benefits from extensive excerpts and drawings from journals both boys kept.

More insightful psychological profiles of Eric and Dylan can be found in the newly published “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters” by Peter Langman (Palgrave Macmillan, $24.95). Langman makes a strong case that Dylan was also a psychopath.

Cullen, unlike Langman, isn’t a psychologist, and he never sufficiently answers the “why” question. (Can anyone?)

But he breaks new ground (he claims Eric was not a virgin, for example), dispels myths (that Eric and Dylan were bullied, that they targeted specific kids, that they were members of the “Trench Coat Mafia”), and makes us feel intensely for those who were killed and wounded. His account of what happened to teacher Dave Sanders, who bled to death over many hours, is heartbreaking. So is his unraveling of the sad story of Cassie Bernall, wrongly heralded as a Christian martyr. It was another girl who told the killers she believed in God.

Could Columbine have been prevented? Both books reveal unfortunate lapses and intentional cover-ups by the authorities and cluelessness on the part of the boys’ parents.

But Eric Harris, coldly intelligent, was a consummate con artist. He hooked up with a lost soul who became his willing partner in a deadly, and unfathomable, folie a deux.