Novel: Hey Nostradamus!

Premise and Structure
Doug Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus! is a polyphonic novel about faith, violence, and the aftershocks of tragedy. Told across four first‑person sections spanning 1988 to 2003, it follows a school shooting’s immediate horror and the ripples that reshape a family, a romance, and a community. Each narrator speaks from a different moral and emotional vantage point, and the overlapping testimonies build a mosaic of grief, belief, guilt, and the fragile possibility of grace.

Cheryl, 1988
Cheryl Anway is a high‑school senior in suburban Vancouver and a member of an evangelical youth group. Secretly married to her boyfriend Jason, she’s newly pregnant, tentative about the future, and uneasy with the judgmental culture around her. Her section unfolds with unadorned clarity: the cafeteria attack erupts, she hides, and she’s fatally wounded. Cheryl narrates after death, offering a lucid, unsentimental account that mingles memory, prayer, and observation. She reflects on the small acts of courage and cruelty that define people under pressure, the hypocrisy she saw in their church circle, and the fierce, ordinary love she felt for Jason. Even as her life is cut short, she insists on meaning rather than melodrama, fixing the reader’s attention on what survives in the mind when time runs out.

Jason, 1999
More than a decade later, Jason carries the weight of what followed. He helped stop one of the gunmen and was briefly cast as a hero, then smeared by rumor and suspicion. A harsh, literalist faith at home, especially from his domineering father, Reg, hardens life after the massacre. Jason’s voice is sardonic, wounded, and stubbornly honest as he catalogs dead‑end jobs, estrangement from family, and the corrosive effect of being misread by strangers and the media. The memoir‑like confession circles Cheryl’s memory, the brief pocket of goodness they made amid a punitive culture, and the complicated hunger to be absolved by a God he no longer trusts.

Heather, 2002
Heather, Jason’s later girlfriend, offers a bracing counterpoint: precise, openhearted, and skeptical without being cynical. When Jason abruptly disappears, she starts receiving calls from a stranger who dangles clues and demands money. Her section unfolds as an address that doubles as an investigation into belief, what it means to trust a voice you can’t verify, to seek guidance from psychics or chance, and to love someone who might already be gone. She sifts scams from possibilities, protects herself, and refuses to let the world’s randomness erase Jason’s worth. Her search becomes a test of agency in a universe that won’t yield neat answers.

Reg, 2003
Reg, Jason’s father, finally speaks in a late‑life attempt at restitution. A rigid evangelical who used scripture as a cudgel, he surveys the wreckage: sons alienated, a family hollowed out, a faith tradition that became an instrument of fear. His voice is the most surprising, still prickly, but cracked open by loss. He tries, haltingly, to make amends to Heather and to the memory of Cheryl, and to admit the human need beneath all his certainties. Whether or not Jason is found, Reg’s confession reframes the novel’s spiritual terrain: authority can fail, doctrine can deceive, and mercy can surface in unlikely places.

Themes and Tone
The title’s nod to prophecy underscores a central irony: nothing foretold spares these characters from randomness. The novel tracks how people curate meaning after senselessness, through religion, love, narrative, even fraud, and how those meanings can either console or imprison. Coupland juxtaposes cruelty with small generosities, satire with tenderness, and rueful humor with longing. What remains is not a solved mystery but a humane ledger of debts and gifts, and a quiet insistence that forgiveness, if it arrives, is not an argument won but a life chosen.