A book club session to read and discuss Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood', with a viewing of the 1967 film.
The Book Club Was Better is back at BookPeople on Monday, August 10, and this time the focus is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. If you've never come across it, it's a non-fiction novel published in 1966 that gives a mostly true accounting of the Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas. It's one of those books that's hard to describe without using a few contradictions: it's a true story told with the pacing and structure of a novel, and it's widely credited with helping launch the true crime genre as we know it today.
Capote didn't just report the story; he lived with it for years, and his process sparked a fair amount of controversy across the literary community. That tension is part of the book's history, and it's something that comes up when you talk about it. The book later inspired Richard Brooks' 1967 crime film of the same name, so there are two ways to experience the story—on the page and on the screen.
In terms of its place in the true crime world, In Cold Blood is regarded as the second best-selling true crime novel of all time, behind only Helter Skelter. That puts it in a league of its own, even decades after it first came out.
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The format here is simple: you read the book and watch the film before the meeting, and then you show up to discuss them. It's a good way to get a second look at the story, especially when you can compare how Capote's writing stacks up against Brooks' adaptation. The session is at BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar, in downtown Austin, on Monday, August 10.
