If there’s more to the story of a Maryland middle school teacher being suspended and “taken in for emergency medical evaluation” than the fact that he wrote a novel involving school shootings in the distant future, administrators and police aren’t talking, WBOC16 reported last week.

23-year-old language arts teacher Patrick McLaw, a.k.a. Dr. K.S. Voltaer and Patrick Beale, is also a novelist writing under a pen name employed by Mace Lane Middle School in Cambridge. He’s the author of two books set 900 years from the present, “The Insurrectionist,” and its sequel, “Lilith’s Heir,” which “caught the attention of police and school board officials in Dorchester County” because of the school shooting scenarios they detailed.

Pending the release of further information, it’s impossible to tell if McLaw did or said anything beyond authoring novels reflective of contemporary commercial fiction that gave authorities credible reason to believe he was a real threat to himself and/or others. Without such details, speculation about “Soviet-style punishment for a novelist” are to be expected, as is an equally likely possibility that this could simply be the type of zero tolerance insanity that results in bizarre gross official overreactions, like a student being suspended for writing about shooting dinosaurs.

FK – More to this below. Don’t miss the comments on the first one:

Cambridge Mace’s Lane Middle School Teacher on Administrative Leave

In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist