In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote

In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote: Truman Capote's crowning achievement. If you're as old as me, you remember Truman Capote as an effete, sneering presence on game shows and talk shows of the 1970's. But he was a great writer, once, and In Cold Blood really is an essential piece of American writing. 

It's also a landmark in novelistic reportage. It's been adapted twice, once as a movie and once as a TV miniseries; the events surrounding Capote's research into the facts have also spawned two movies, Capote and Infamous. Philip Seymour Hoffman won the Oscar for Best Actor for playing Capote in Capote. 

In 1959 near Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family (the father, mother, teen-aged son, and teen-aged daughter) were murdered by person or persons unknown. Capote was in the area within a couple of weeks to cover the investigation. The murders were brutal enough and mysterious enough to briefly spark national outrage.

The killers would turn out to be Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, two petty criminals who'd come up from Texas to the Clutter home because Hickock had been told stories by his cellmate during a recent prison stay that the Clutters kept all of their money at home in a safe. The Clutters did not actually do this. The small amount of money the two murderers got from the Clutter home was soon used up, though a couple of items taken by Smith would help clinch the case against them once they were apprehended.

The brutality of the murders and the subsequent revelation that they were essentially meaningless fascinated America for a time, especially once Smith and Hickock were caught several months after the Clutter massacre. 

The stories and questions that swirl around the writing of In Cold Blood -- and specifically how involved Capote became with Smith and Hickock -- have come to obscure what a triumph the book is. Capote's vivid descriptions of place, character, and happenstance are marvelous and heart-breaking and occasionally sinister. He concisely presents the Clutters and their killers, the investigators and the neighbours, and a wide variety of other 'characters' both central and peripheral to the case. 

If Capote had too much sympathy for Perry Smith in real life, it doesn't particularly show in the book: Smith is a fascinating charmer, but also a man capable of complete indifference to lives other than his own. It was Hickock who fantasized before the fact about slaughtering the Clutters, but it was Smith who actually did the killings: perversely, he did so after making three of the victims more comfortable and, in a paradoxical bit of humanity, preventing Hickock from raping the daughter before killing her. 

Hindsight allows for certain new observations to make about Smith and Hickock. They both may have suffered from traumatic brain injuries as adults as a result of auto accidents. Hickock's obsession with killing the Clutters often presents itself as murderous envy spawned by a life of poverty and privation. Both Smith and Hickock seem to possess the uncanny charm often attributed to certain types of psychopaths. And so on, and so forth.

In Cold Blood does a lot of things very, very well. It's also a fine 'real-life' police procedural, and a fine 'real-life' court procedural. It's a testament to fine writing and reporting. Highly recommended.

The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916)

The Terror by Arthur Machen (1916): Written in a straightforward journalistic style that's unlike Machen's earlier works of weird fiction that include "The White People" and "The Great God Pan," The Terror is instead the great-grandfather of Max Brooks' World War Z. The Terror depicts its events as real, investigated by the unnamed narrator. 

Those events aren't zombie attacks -- they're mysterious deaths breaking out in various locations throughout Great Britain during World War One. Have the Germans landed some sort of hidden force on the British Isles? Is someone using a mysterious 'Z-Ray' to smother people or send them running off cliffs to their deaths? Or is there something wrong with the animal kingdom?

Machen was writing furiously at this time in his life, forced into newspaper work in order to pay the bills. The Terror isn't the imaginative and literary triumph that the aforementioned stories were, but it's still an enjoyable and often weird book. It's also an important permutation in horror's long love affair with the pseudo-documentarian style. Where 'letters' and 'journal entries' once told us that what we were reading was 'real,' now the journalistic voice does.

It's also a mutation of something going back to at least Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. In that early 18th-century work, DeFoe told a fictional 'you-are-there' story about a real event. Machen embeds The Terror in the real, early events of the Great War and then, like DeFoe, tells everything as a piece of actual reportage. It's a major stylistic leap.

There are many fine moments of horror and pity throughout The Terror, along with some marvelously weird images. Machen captures the way fear can travel through gossip when the official channels are trying to hide the problem. A late-novel tableaux of horror at an isolated farm is especially well-managed through the description of the aftermath and through a dead man's journal describing the mysterious and terrible events that led to that aftermath.

There are a couple of flaws to note. One isn't so much a flaw as a relative lack of closure. Things just sort of stop. This first flaw is exacerbated by the second, which is the narrator's jaw-dropping, climactic theory about why what happened, happened. It's an explanation totally in keeping with Arthur Machen's beliefs about society. But it's a moment of political and social commentary that will leave a sour aftertaste with anyone who doesn't long to live in a medieval fiefdom. I kid you not. Recommended.