In Cold Blood

The non-fiction book I chose to read for class is In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. This book is about The Clutter family living in Holcomb, Kansas, who is murdered by a shotgun on November 15, 1959. In the family there is the father Herbert , the mother Bonnie, three daughters named Eveanna, Beverly, and Nancy, and one son Kenyon.  Mr. Clutter does most of the work around the house, and so does Nancy, the youngest daughter. Mrs. Clutter suffers from postnatal depression and had had fits and seizures; she would regularly visit hospitals for periods of time and lives a private life. The older children, Eveanna and Beverly, no longer live at the house, so at the time of the shooting it was just the four of them. The Clutter family is pretty wealthy and live on a large piece of land. Before the murder, everyone kind of trusted each other in Holcomb. After the murder took place people began to mistrust each other, and the town did not know what to do because such a good family like the Clutters was murdered, and now no one feels safe anymore. The family was so well loved and known that 1,000 people had attended the service for them.

In the beginning, the book was very slow and it felt like it told more than what was necessary to find out what happened to the family. The author wrote the book in a way that goes back and forth between the victims and murderers up until the moment of the shooting. I actually enjoyed that style of writing because it's kind of like a play-by-play for the characters and shows what they were doing the last day before they were shot/killed the family. It also makes you want to keep reading because it feels like with every page you're just getting closer and closer to finding out what happened. The only bad thing about this style of writing is you know what is going to happen to the people, but they don't know. It's like when you watch a scary movie and you know something bad is going to happen so you yell at the TV for the person to run away, but they get killed anyway. That's exactly how it felt for me when I was reading this book.

The book jumps from right before the murders to the next day when family friends of the Clutters find the bodies. I thought this was very smart of Truman Capote because if I had known exactly how the murders took place in the beginning, I wouldn't have wanted to keep reading; however, he leaves that up until later in the book when the killers confess about the murders. The middle of the book to the end jumps back and forth between trying to find the killers and the killers themselves dealing with the actions that they have made. When they finally confess, they also share their motive for the killings, which turns out to not be a motive for killing at all. I don't want to give too much away though so I will not say anymore about that. The last part is all about the execution and the two killers awaiting to find out their fate. It turns out a little over five years after the murders took place, the killers were hung for their crime.

Overall, I thought the book was very interesting and I really liked how you got to see the killers perspectives up until the end of their lives as well.