Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - In Cold Blood

I can totally see how this became a hit and completely redefined the way true crime was written. I didn't think it would take too long to read when I first started, and my copy wasn't very thick, but this book is dense. I could read for 45 minutes and discover that I'd only read 10-12 pages.

It's also probably the first book where I've had to write out all the names, because the first third or so of the book throws dozens of people at you, some you never really see again, and some you do. So it's hard to know who is going to be important until the story unfolds.

Also, as you get deeper into the book, it becomes less about the true crime, and morphs into a study of the killers' lives, one in particular. By the end it's obvious that this was done to show that criminal psychology is complex and not as black and white as it was believed back in the 1950s. But the reader doesn't really know that while slogging through the middle of the book, which is bogged down with pages and pages of letters and biopyschosocial history.

Still, glad I read it, and it's probably a must for any true crime lover.

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henrygravesprince's review against another edition

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dark mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

3.75

Capote’s prose is masterful, but the non-fiction aspect was handled in a way I don’t find responsible, and I think that, as one of the first major modern true crime media “sensations”, In Cold Blood embodies many of the same problems that true crime media, particularly dramatizations, maintains today. I don’t dislike Capote, and in fact I quite like his writing for the most part, but I couldn’t in good conscience give this book a wholly glowing review. There would still be issues if I looked at it the way one looks at fiction, but monumentally less — that said, it is not purely fiction, and I can’t look at this novel & not be acutely aware of the fact that these were real people & the facts were embellished in ways that can’t really be brushed off, in my opinion.

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moraina's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

This was a very slow read for me. I appreciate that Truman Capote presented everything as factual and didn’t sensationalize, since these were real people that were affected by an awful crime. However, his lengthy descriptions and tedious run-on sentences sometimes made it difficult to stay engaged. I think he did do a fair job representing the events that happened and provided both commentary from a more outside perspective as well as representing how the community felt during these events, but the writing style did lessen my enjoyment of the book.

The descriptions of Dick and Perry’s capture and subsequent trial really did make me think on what is considered substantial evidence and a fair trial. I think Capote also did a good job delving into the ethics of capital punishment. It is interesting to see how much more religion played a role in these matters, given both the time period and geographic location of the events. Exploring the childhood of Perry, in particular, does end up being rather important for understanding the murders. I found the discussion of childhood abuse and the reasons for “murders with no apparent motive” quite interesting as well (although terrible, of course).

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