This Blog Was Composed...In Cold Blood...

I started In Cold Blood this weekend.

So far, it’s fantastic.

I’ve made it through the first one-hundred pages (paperback edition) and can’t put the novel down. Actually that’s technically a lie since I read eighty of the hundred pages Saturday night (I have no life) and twenty more last night (Tuesday) which means, I guess, that I really didn’t have any trouble putting it down. But I swear I spent a good amount of time thinking about it and wanting to read. Honestly, I only intended to pick the book up and read ten or fifteen pages just to get it on my radar and become invested in the book club, if you will. I’m also reading David Robert’s Shantaram (which I’ve been reading forever) and itching to start David Wellington’s 13 Bullets, plus the new HP comes out this Saturday so I didn’t want In Cold Blood to get lost in the shuffle. I never really intended to start reading heavily but the book is really captivating, full of images I can’t get out of my head.

It moved a little slowly for the first couple of pages but Capote paints such a vivid picture of all parties involved that, by the time I reached the section where the Clutter family is gruesomely and efficiently dispatched, I was really horrified. The fact that the crime took place during 1959 in small-town Kansas only makes it even more impossible to comprehend. These murders would really be shocking to me today, forty-eight years later, so I can’t imagine what kind of amazement and gruesome interest the killings must have generated at the time. I’m just reaching a section where Capote is beginning to stress the level of fear and mistrust the quadruple homicide caused in Holcomb and I can see why. With an apparently motiveless crime wiping out an entire family, and not just any family mind you but some of Holcomb’s most distinguished citizens, I’d definitely be locking my doors from that day forward. And get a watchdog (that isn’t afraid of guns for god’s sake).

I also find that In Cold Blood is surprisingly well written and can only imagine what the true crime genre would be like in 2007 if some of today’s more talented writers devoted their efforts to it. The only pet peeve I have so far is the way Capote puts some of the text in the middle of paragraphs into quotations to stress that a brief snippet is a direct quote, despite the fact that most of the work is simply retold in the structure of a traditional novel. I don’t know why this bothers me, but for some reason it does.

I’ve already done a little background reading about the book (on Wikipedia, don’t kill me Laura!) and will definitely check out the film as well as Capote after I finish.

A final note: I can’t believe how progressive some of these rural folk were in frickin’ 1959. It seems that a lot of participants are divorced, and strict, conservative Mr. Clutter allowed Nancy’s boyfriend to stay at their house until ten p.m. watching television. My curfew was eleven o’clock until I was seventeen and this was the mid to late nineties! And what kind of farmer stays up that late anyway? I thought farmers went to bed early and woke around four or five o’clock in the morning…