Beware that creaking floorboard in the night....

books:


	• In Cold Blood Truman Capote Modern Library, 2002 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 428 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Would have been 5 stars 40 years ago!

After seeing both film versions of the writing of this book, I decided it was high time to read this classic. And it is a genuine classic, no question about that. If I had read it when it first came out, I'm sure I would have been stunned along with the rest of the country. Reading it now, after the genre has been taken to new heights by the likes of Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff) and others, it didn't pack quite the punch I expected. But it still packs a punch, no question about it. It still has the power to make you sick to your stomach as he takes you through the last hours of the Clutter family. There are moments of wonderful writing, as wonderful as writing can be about such disturbing events.

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A classic

I bought this book when i bought Breakfast at Tiffany's. And I am so glad I did. I had never heard of it before but now that I have read it I don't know how I could never have heard of it. I am a big true crime fiend, and I also love fiction. This combined the two so nicely. It was brilliantly and beautifully written from the beginning to the end I can't think of any of it that did not engross me. I couldn't put it down once I started.

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A classic, a literary masterpiece

It started with a few sentences in the back of The New York Times about a seemingly senseless murder in Kansas. Truman Capote read this brief article and decided to invent a completely new genre of writing, the non-fiction novel. This book is the result of Capote's research with Harper Lee and moved the murders of the Clutter family from the back of The NY Times to the front of the bestseller lists.

The book starts by introducing us to Herb Clutter and his family. Capote builds a description of a decent, kind, generous, respected, and hardworking family. Although Capote built a reputation as a flamboyant character, he shows enormous respect for the Clutters. Inter-weaved with his description of the Clutters is his description of the two men, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who are about to destroy this family. The suspense builds as the killers get closer and closer. Capote then skips ahead to the discovery of the bodies and we are left knowing what happened but not how or why.

The next section of the book inter-weaves the movements of the killers with the story of the investigators trying to discover their identity. Slowly we learn more and more about the nature and background of these two sociopaths. Meanwhile, the investigation struggles forward until a lucky break leads to the capture. At this point, we finally learn what happened the night of the killings in the words of the killers themselves. The final section details the trial and ultimate punishment of Hickock and Smith.

The book is brilliantly written. Although there have been questions about the complete accuracy of the story (Capote never took notes during interviews and the book has no footnotes) it is still a compelling and frightening book. The combination of creative writing with journalism created a new genre of writing and makes every other "true crime" book read like a high school project. Capote pulls his readers into the story creating empathy for the victims (the dead as well as the living) while letting us see into the minds of the killers as well as Hickock and Smith were ever able to see into themselves. This is a book that is a classic, a literary masterpiece even if it isn't an example of perfect accuracy. It is a must read.

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Good Book

It's an American classic and I'm glad I finally read it. I'm not sure if the younger generations will appreciate it as much.

Beware that creaking floorboard in the night....

When does the boy struggling to become a man have his first encounter with true EVIL? For me it came on a summer night in 1967 when I saw the film In Cold Blood with a large group of friends at our Small Town, Wisconsin theater. It was a Friday night and none of us knew anything about the film or the book on which it was based. We were just a bunch of high school kids going to the show, mainly for the air conditioning and a few laughs after a hot, humid day. While my friends did whatever they did, I was rapidly sucked into the plan to murder the Cutters. It was to be the scariest movie I have ever seen-- sending me into a virtual frozen panic attack as the black and white images shown before me: the horror of the crime itself, Perry and Dick's capture and trial, followed by their shadowy, graphic fate at the end of the film. For weeks afterward, whenever I heard a car door slam outside in the night,I'd run to look out my bedroom window, just in case. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, it's safe to say that the film really shook me up. Later, when I read the book for a lit class in college, I went through it again--reading it in a dim, barely furnished apartment I shared with some other guys. As I read the book, and it all unfolded again ( this time in Capote's calculated, poetic prose), the nature of real evil began to take shape. In fact, In Cold Blood is really the only book I've ever read that actually terrified me; I experienced evil from the printed word (Now, that's some writing!). The fact that the Cutters, who knew nothing about what was to befall them as they went to bed that night in Kansas, only to be awoken by strangers Smith and Hickock who savagely murdered by them, helped make evil an almost tangible force that crowded around me as I read. Today when thrill killing and mass murder have become staples of broadcast news, ("true crime" even has its own section at the local Barnes & Noble), its easy to forget that this wasn't always the case. Unfortunately, Dick and Perry have since been joined in their own special section of Hell by Richard Speck, Andrew Conanan, Ted Bundy, John W. Gacey, and a long list of others. But Capote wrote about it first: In fact, once you read his chilling book, that creaking floorboard you hear in the night takes on an eerie extra significance.

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