Blood Will Out – The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade - Hardcover

Kirn, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871404516 ISBN 13: 9780871404510

Publisher: Liveright, 2014

Synopsis

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer. Kirn's one-of-a-kind story of being duped by a real-life Mr. Ripley takes us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the posh private clubrooms of Manhattan to the hard-boiled courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles. As Kirn uncovers the truth about his friend, a psychopath masquerading as a gentleman, he also confronts hard truths about himself. Why, as a writer of fiction, was he susceptible to the deception of a sinister fantasist whose crimes, Kirn learns, were based on books and movies? What are the hidden psychological links between the artist and the con man? To answer these and other questions, Kirn attends his old friend s murder trial and uses it as an occasion to reflect on both their tangled personal relationship and the surprising literary sources of Rockefeller's evil. This investigation of the past climaxes in a tense jailhouse reunion with a man whom Kirn realizes he barely knew a predatory, sophisticated genius whose life, in some respects, parallels his own and who may have intended to take another victim during his years as a fugitive from justice: Kirn himself. Combining confessional memoir, true crime reporting, and cultural speculation, Blood Will Out is a Dreiser-esque tale of self-invention, upward mobility, and intellectual arrogance. It exposes the layers of longing and corruption, ambition and self-delusion beneath the Great American con."

About this title

Review

In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald.--Nina Burleigh

This stunning book dissects psychopathy, the perverse manners of the Internet generation, art, money, and the very nature of belief. At its core, it brilliantly portrays one man's journey through fraudulence to a point of stern resolve. It's tabloid tell-all journalism and Old Testament rebuke. It is of a piece with Roethke: it tells us that the abyss is just a step down the stair.--James Ellroy

This scorching account of a friendship with a man who overturned the author's faith in his own judgment owes its strength to the author's deep understanding of 'the fathomless human genius for credulity, wishful thinking, and self deception, ' starting with his own. Kirn parses the ways in which a highly intelligent writer got caught up with a character more compelling than any he could create, such that this book has the power and insight and raw energy of an instant classic.--Amy Hempel

There is no finer guide to the American berserk than Walter Kirn.--Gary Shteyngart

This fascinating account from the perspective of a victim should appeal to readers of memoirs and true crime titles.--Deirdre Bray

[A] tight, gripping book...This bit of noir, from Mr. Kirn about Clark Rockefeller, is just right.--Janet Maslin

A Hitchcockian psychological thriller and one of the most honest and affecting memoirs I've read. It is superbly written, each sentence a wonder, each page deepening my appreciation of Kirn's precise observation of human nature.--Amy Tan

Kirn bravely lays bare his own vanities and follies in this heart-pounding true tale; he examines the hold of fiction on the human imagination--how we live for it and occasionally die for it, too.--Judith Newman

Absorbing... If there's anything rarer than a con man with Clark's gift for the game, it's a writer of Kirn's quicksilver accomplishment... To have someone of Kirn's ability write about the case from the inside promises exceptional insight into the way such tricksters operate and the even greater enigma of what motivates them.--Laura Miller

Engrossing... A haunting, pained and terrifically engaging self-interrogation... That's what makes great memoirs--which this one is--so interesting: They're at once authentic and performative. They're not all that different in that respect from the act of an impostor and murderer such as Gerhartsreiter, missing only the essential ingredient of madness... It's a major step forward as a writer.--Charles Finch

Book Description

An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0871404516
• ISBN 13: 9780871404510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272