In almost every bookstore I have ever been in, In Cold Blood has been set aside on the special shelf of staff recommended reading accompanied by a small, hand-written note stating that they wish they could unload the book from their minds just so they could read it for the first time again.
I always put off reading this book because I thought there was no way one book could live up to this much hype.
In Cold Blood tells the story of a wheat farmer in Kansas who was murdered in his home along with his wife, his son, and his daughter. Few clues were left behind, the the novel follows the events that lead up to the mass murder and runs to 5-years after the crime has been solved.
One of the impressive things about this book was that is was one of the first of its kind. It is now a blueprint for almost any true crime or nonfiction novel that has followed. It is this nonfiction label that has often made a lot of people wonder how much creative license the author took with this book. Despite the 8,000 pages of notes Capote took during his five years researching for this novel, a lot of critics take the stance that the book is not as factual as the author claims. There are pages of dialogue that seem to clean and clever for people to say naturally during interviews and scenes that the people involved claimed never happened.
But on the other hand, this book captivated me. Even when I knew the fate of everyone involved, I kept staying up late to keep reading to see just how it all fell into place.
Capote goes into such depth in his details of the people and daily life of the town that it feels like he spent his whole life there out there on the dusty plains, working a tractor and swapping gossip at the cafe. The book goes so far into the backgrounds of his villains that, despite their monstrous deeds, you can't help be see that they are human. It would have been so easy to make them flat characters, just demons that wreck havoc, but Capote shows a lot of empathy for their lives--especially with Perry Smith.
A number of times, I read a sentence that struck me by how perfectly phrased it was or how it turned a mundane, everyday thing and made it seem new, such as: "He had merely fallen face down across the bed, as though sleep were a weapon that had struck him from behind."
I was very much impressed by this book.
much love,
hedgie
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