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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
‘As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.’
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
challenging
emotional
funny
informative
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
dark
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
slow-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
I first encountered Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in high school. It was assigned to me as a senior book report, and at the time, it felt more like a punishment than a gift. To say I was unenthusiastic would be putting it mildly. I’d never heard of the book and didn’t yet have an appreciation for American literature.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading—I did (and still do)—but my interests back then leaned heavily into action and adventure. I had recently discovered my father’s stash of pocket paperbacks: pulpy fiction, filled with wild excitement, comedy, and machismo. In Cold Blood felt like a cold fish to my teenage mind.
As the years passed, my reading interests matured and broadened (though I still enjoy a wild, fantastical tale from time to time). Like most readers, my TBR stack grows endlessly. It wasn’t until I spotted a freshly jacketed edition of Capote’s classic in the "Banned Books" section of our local bookstore that I came face-to-face with my younger self—his naivety, his general meat-headedness—and decided it was time to give this story a real read, 33 years after I'd skimmed enough pages to assemble a barely passable book report.
And what a read it turned out to be.
From the very beginning, In Cold Blood gave me a particular feeling I’ve only had a few times while reading—a sense of quiet, reverent awe. The last time I felt something like it was while reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild—another work that balances human gentleness with longing, anguish, and inevitable tragedy. Like Wild, Blood reads as part-travelogue, part-elegy, taking us across post–World War II America, trailing the lives of the Clutter family (our lovable victims), the small-town community left shattered in the aftermath, Dick and Perry (our equally simple and complex killers), and the lawmen who pursued them.
We live now in a flood of stories like this—true crime has become its own cultural language—but reading In Cold Blood as an adult, I was acutely aware that I was in the presence of something foundational. I was reading the roots of a genre. I was also in the hands of a master researcher and storyteller.
The book’s pacing is nearly perfect. Capote draws you in slowly, easing you into a sense of comfort and nostalgia—then quietly, expertly, replaces that warmth with dread. The Clutter family and their Kansas community aren’t perfect, but Capote renders them with care, allowing us to feel their absence long before the crime unfolds in full.
Dick and Perry are, strangely, likable at times. I found myself pitying them often, while never forgetting the sociopathic capacity that lurked just beneath their very human surfaces. I was shocked by how early in the story the murders actually take place—and even more surprised at how long it took before we are given the full, grisly account of what really happened, told in the killers’ own words.
There were moments in this book that made me weep. When those moments came, I let them. This is a tragic story, and Capote never flinches from that truth.
But beyond the murders, the chase, and the ultimate fate of Dick and Perry, In Cold Blood also serves as a portrait of a changing America. It captures a moment in history where the country was beginning to reckon with a new kind of violence, trying to understand how such crimes happened and who, exactly, was capable of committing them. Capote gives us language, structure, and perspective to begin that reckoning.
After finishing the book, I looked up images of the Clutters and their killers. The family looked much as Capote had described. But Perry—Perry chilled me. The photograph matched the face I had imagined almost perfectly. There was something in his eyes—cold, flat, emptied of empathy. It’s astonishing, and disturbing, to consider that the same mind could hold music, poetry, affection for animals, and a self-fashioned moral code… and still harbor the capacity to commit such brutal, senseless violence.
Those were the eyes of a remorseless, cold-blooded killer.
If you’re a fan of true crime and haven’t yet read In Cold Blood, I highly recommend you do. It’s more than a murder story—it’s a masterwork that changed nonfiction forever, and a haunting meditation on the duality of human nature.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading—I did (and still do)—but my interests back then leaned heavily into action and adventure. I had recently discovered my father’s stash of pocket paperbacks: pulpy fiction, filled with wild excitement, comedy, and machismo. In Cold Blood felt like a cold fish to my teenage mind.
As the years passed, my reading interests matured and broadened (though I still enjoy a wild, fantastical tale from time to time). Like most readers, my TBR stack grows endlessly. It wasn’t until I spotted a freshly jacketed edition of Capote’s classic in the "Banned Books" section of our local bookstore that I came face-to-face with my younger self—his naivety, his general meat-headedness—and decided it was time to give this story a real read, 33 years after I'd skimmed enough pages to assemble a barely passable book report.
And what a read it turned out to be.
From the very beginning, In Cold Blood gave me a particular feeling I’ve only had a few times while reading—a sense of quiet, reverent awe. The last time I felt something like it was while reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild—another work that balances human gentleness with longing, anguish, and inevitable tragedy. Like Wild, Blood reads as part-travelogue, part-elegy, taking us across post–World War II America, trailing the lives of the Clutter family (our lovable victims), the small-town community left shattered in the aftermath, Dick and Perry (our equally simple and complex killers), and the lawmen who pursued them.
We live now in a flood of stories like this—true crime has become its own cultural language—but reading In Cold Blood as an adult, I was acutely aware that I was in the presence of something foundational. I was reading the roots of a genre. I was also in the hands of a master researcher and storyteller.
The book’s pacing is nearly perfect. Capote draws you in slowly, easing you into a sense of comfort and nostalgia—then quietly, expertly, replaces that warmth with dread. The Clutter family and their Kansas community aren’t perfect, but Capote renders them with care, allowing us to feel their absence long before the crime unfolds in full.
Dick and Perry are, strangely, likable at times. I found myself pitying them often, while never forgetting the sociopathic capacity that lurked just beneath their very human surfaces. I was shocked by how early in the story the murders actually take place—and even more surprised at how long it took before we are given the full, grisly account of what really happened, told in the killers’ own words.
There were moments in this book that made me weep. When those moments came, I let them. This is a tragic story, and Capote never flinches from that truth.
But beyond the murders, the chase, and the ultimate fate of Dick and Perry, In Cold Blood also serves as a portrait of a changing America. It captures a moment in history where the country was beginning to reckon with a new kind of violence, trying to understand how such crimes happened and who, exactly, was capable of committing them. Capote gives us language, structure, and perspective to begin that reckoning.
After finishing the book, I looked up images of the Clutters and their killers. The family looked much as Capote had described. But Perry—Perry chilled me. The photograph matched the face I had imagined almost perfectly. There was something in his eyes—cold, flat, emptied of empathy. It’s astonishing, and disturbing, to consider that the same mind could hold music, poetry, affection for animals, and a self-fashioned moral code… and still harbor the capacity to commit such brutal, senseless violence.
Those were the eyes of a remorseless, cold-blooded killer.
If you’re a fan of true crime and haven’t yet read In Cold Blood, I highly recommend you do. It’s more than a murder story—it’s a masterwork that changed nonfiction forever, and a haunting meditation on the duality of human nature.