Tolog Review: In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
reviewed by Yijun Sui

    In Cold Blood by Truman Capote is a wonderful suspense novel, which makes me think deeply of the characters’ lives and society. Truman Capote explains a brutal killing, which is vivid, but also makes me feel my blood is cold.

    The book talks about two men who kill the Clutter family, one was full of kindness and gentility, for money. The author is a detective who works for FBI and is responsible for investigating this killing. He brings two killers to my life by supplement their background and psyche. For example, the killer Perry was a smart and aggressive young gay when he was younger. What happened in his life and made him become a cold-blood person? He grew up in a family that was poor and had no sense of tenderness his mother was a drunkard and had an immoral lifestyle; his parents were divorced because of incompatibility. He went to San Francisco with his mother, but his mother sent him to orphanages. He was abused and ridiculed by sisters in an orphanage because of bed-wetting in his first orphanage. After he went to another orphanage, a homosexual violated him when he was sixteen. In 1948 he became a solider, he tried find a better life; he won the bronze medal when he was in Asia. However, after he came back to America, both his family and the society still abandoned him. He became brutal and self- contradictory, but he was not the person who made mistakes; it was the society’s problem. I asked myself after I read this book, why our society was so indifferent to him? Who can keep a warm heart with a dark background likes Perry’s? I take pity on him, because his family and society did not give him any chances to have a normal personality.

    Furthermore, In Cold Blood gives me a sense of oppression from the beginning to the end. When the author explains the life of Clutter family, he uses “the last day” many times. It forebodes the death of this family, so everything seems like a tragedy. Moreover, before Perry and Dick killed the Clutter family, they had a conversation with Herbert Clutter and Nancy Clutter. These two killers, especially Perry, tended to think these persons should not be killed. But suddenly in a moment, they cut the victims’ throat. The contrast of Perry’s behavior is too huge to understand (“I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat”). This brutal killing shows how heartless they were.


     In Cold Blood shows a cold-blood society, cold-blood human nature and makes me feel my blood becomes cold while I am reading. Americans were shocked by the killing, which not only gives us introspection about human nature, but also warns us to give warmth to others as much as possible, because we do not want to see more “Perrys” in the world.