In Cold Blood
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.
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Community Reviews
Hats off to Capote for introducing the genre of non-fiction crime. If not the first, definitely the most famous forerunner. How such non-sensical, horrific murders take place will never be understood by the sane mind. It's hard to vacillate between the terror of the victims and any sense of compassion for the killers. Capote gives us food for thought but only God can understand.
The events are horrific and reading about it is tortuous, but the book is so well-written it is just bearable.
The manner in which this work was written made the biggest impact on me; that is it being non-fiction written like a fiction and how Capote demonstrated his own personal ideals throughout the narrative. The way Capote wrote about Perry stood out to me in contrast to the way Dick was written, which I later learned that this was done very intentionally. Knowing this context made the read all the more intriguing, if I'm honest. It was very clear to me why this is a book that is often an assigned-reading in academia, given all the literary directions one can analyze.
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