A review by librarymouse
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.25

This text was jarring in that there was vibrant and comprehensive descriptions of seemingly innocuous details and then facts like Hickock's pedophilic tendencies were dropped into the middle of a paragraph, only to be left and then picked up again after dozens of pages. The descriptions of the Clutters, their family life, their friends, and their pastoral joys made the details of their deaths all the more profoundly upsetting. I appreciated the depth of research that went into this book and the information given on the communities the Clutters and their killers spent time in, but I am also, in some ways, upset with the lengths at which this book works to humanize the killers. It's bitter to feel something akin to empathy with either of them or the men that lived with them on death row.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body shaming, Cancer, Child abuse, Child death, Chronic illness, Confinement, Death, Gore, Gun violence, Hate crime, Mental illness, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Sexual content, Suicidal thoughts, Terminal illness, Violence, Blood, Grief, Car accident, Death of parent, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Toxic friendship, and Alcohol