Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

( 9 )

Overview

A USA Today Top 10 Best Book of Winter 2014
An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.
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...

See more details below
Hardcover
$19.03
BN.com price
(Save 26%)$25.95 List Price
Pick Up In Store

Pick Up In Store

Reserve and pick up in 60 minutes at your local store

Other sellers (Hardcover)
  • All (79) from $4.29   
  • New (28) from $11.7   
  • Used (51) from $4.29   
Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

Available on NOOK devices and apps  
  • NOOK Devices
  • Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK
  • NOOK HD/HD+ Tablet
  • NOOK
  • NOOK Color
  • NOOK Tablet
  • Tablet/Phone
  • NOOK for Windows 8 Tablet
  • NOOK for iOS
  • NOOK for Android
  • NOOK Kids for iPad
  • PC/Mac
  • NOOK for Windows 8
  • NOOK for PC
  • NOOK for Mac
  • NOOK for Web

Want a NOOK? Explore Now

NOOK Book (eBook)
$12.99
BN.com price
(Save 42%)$22.73 List Price

More About This Book

Overview

A USA Today Top 10 Best Book of Winter 2014
An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.
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.

Read More Show Less

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Walter Kirn is a talented novelist (both his Up in the Air and Thumbsucker were made into major motion pictures), but he could have never dreamed up a scenario as strange as the story of his encounters with the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller. What began in 1998 as an inquiry from a Montana humane society became a ten-year friendship that ended with revelations and trials about multiple fake identities, a kidnapping, perhaps multiple murders, and one homicide conviction. In Blood Will Out, he examines into how conmen make us complicit in our deception even as he delves into the personalities of this master impostor.

The New York Times Book Review - Nina Burleigh
In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald, chronicling upper-crust America in free fall.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/13/2014
In the summer of 1998, Kirn (Up In the Air) was a struggling writer, taking assignments where he could get them, when he accepted an odd task: transporting a crippled dog from a Montana animal shelter to New York City, where a wealthy benefactor from the Rockefeller family eagerly awaited its arrival. That alone could have made for a quirky riff on Steinbeck’s classic Travels with Charley, but Kirn’s road trip took another turn entirely as he entered a wild and murky 15-year friendship with the man who called himself “Clark Rockefeller”—a man who would eventually be the target of a nationwide FBI manhunt and charged with murder. Kirn artfully relates how the man born as Christian Gerhartstreiter manipulated those around him, operating against a backdrop of elite mens’ clubs, expensive art, constant name-dropping, and tales of wealth and sophistication. The parallels with Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley are not lost on Kirn, who spends as much time trying to understand how he and others fell under Gerhartstreiter’s spell as he does relating the primary tale of the criminal himself. Kirn’s candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Entertainment. (Mar.)
Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly
“Kirn is such a good writer and Gerhartsreiter such a baroquely, demonically colorful subject, you could imagine this being a fine read had they no personal connection. That they did, however, elevates Blood Will Out to another level: Kirn lards his story with detail while reviewing his own psyche, in an attempt to discover how he—a journalist!—could have been so fooled. The irony? With all due respect to Kirn's skills as a novelist, it is hard to conceive of any fictionalized version of 'Clark Rockefeller' being as compelling as the real thing.”
Nina Burleigh - New York Times Book Review
“In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald.”
Judith Newman - More Magazine
“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.”
Amity Gaige - Slate
“The story of Blood Will Out is one of cosmic ironies and jaw-dropping reversals… What makes Blood Will Out so absorbing is its teller more than its subject. Kirn’s persona is captivating—funny, pissed off, highly literate, and self-searching. He’s also an elegant, classic writer… Add the highly readable, intricately told Blood Will Out to the list of great books about the dizzying tensions of the writing life and the maddening difficulty of getting at the truth.”
Heller McAlpin - The Washington Post
“[A] fascinating account of the imposter he considered his friend for 10 years… Blood Will Out is an exploration of a hoaxer from the point of view of a mark, and of a relationship based on interlocking deceptions and self-deceptions. The result is a moral tale about the dangers of social climbing on a rickety ladder—for both those trying to scramble up the rungs and those trying to hold it steady below.”
Larry Lebowitz - Miami Herald
“Riveting and disturbing, Blood Will Out is a mélange of memoir, stranger-than-fiction crime reporting and cultural critique. The literary markers run the gamut from James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, and Fyodor Doestoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley trilogy and Strangers on a Train. Kirn’s self-lacerating meditations on class, art, vanity, ambition, betrayal and delusion elevate the material beyond its pulpy core… Kirn’s belated acceptance of reality provides the most fascinating and frustrating element of this engaging, self-flagellating memoir.”
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times
“One of the most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe— Each new revelation comes subtly, and each adds to the pathetic and creepy portrait of Clark Rockefeller as a vacuous manipulator— The ending of Blood Will Out is at once deeply ambiguous and deeply satisfying. By then, Kirn has looked into the eyes of a cruel, empty man—and learned a lot about himself in the process.”
Janet Maslin - New York Times Book Review
“[A] tight, gripping book…This bit of noir, from Mr. Kirn about Clark Rockefeller, is just right.”
Nina Burleigh - The New York Times Book Review
“In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald.”
Gerald Bartell - San Francisco Chronicle
“Kirn's voice throughout is witty and sharp. His canny, deceptively casual organization of the narrative heightens suspense, and the words and images in his flowing prose cut like laser beams… For its devastating, unsettling psychological insights and its rich, polished writing, Blood Will Out equals Truman Capote's In Cold Blood as a nonfiction novel of crime.”
Eugenia Williamson - Boston Globe
“Blood Will Out…makes the darkness visible. Kirn’s account of his friendship with this strange and terrible man cuts through the frippery of Gerhartsreiter’s outrageous affectations to reveal the Lovecraftian nightmare hiding beneath the J. Press blazer. Blood Will Out is a wise, deeply frightening, and potentially sleep-disrupting read… In the end, Kirn manages to transform his personal account of one of this century’s most aberrant personalities into a vessel bearing universal truths about narrative, evil, and the American Dream itself.”
Laura Miller - Salon.com
“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.”
Charles Finch - Chicago Tribune
“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.”
Eric Banks - Bookforum
“A nod to a different canon of con men and tricksters: the protagonist of Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the prep-school clones of Leopold and Loeb of Hitchcock’s Rope, and Highsmith’s highbrow hucksters—all crossed with the shadows of film noir.”
James Ellroy
“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.”
Edmund White
“In Blood Will Out Walter Kirn brilliantly and with remarkable eloquence dissects one of the great impostors—and along the way delves into the fraudulence within that made him so susceptible to the other man's lies. A gripping performance!”
Joyce Carol Oates
“Though Blood Will Out is written with Walter Kirn's usual stylistic verve, insight, and imagination it is actually a disturbing account of a one-sided, naively misguided 'friendship' with a dangerous sociopath. Here is a memoir in the guise of a 'true crime story'—a double portrait of writer and subject in which the subject is partially erased even as the writer evokes the considerable tools of his imagination to reconstruct him and his own motive in the bizarre relationship.”
Amy Tan
“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.”
Mary Karr
“Blood Will Out is a deep meditation on wealth and class and anybody's self-destructive ability to get conned by a blackbelt liar. A must-read.”
Amy Hempel
“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.”
Gary Shteyngart
“There is no finer guide to the American berserk than Walter Kirn.”
Kirkus Reviews
2014-01-05
The complicated, credulity-straining relationship between the author and his subject leaves the reader wondering about both of them. This is a book about two very strange characters. One is best known as Clark Rockefeller, "the most prodigious serial imposter in recent history," a convicted murderer, a kidnapper and a psychopath. The other is Kirn (My Mother's Bible: A Son Discovers Clues to God, 2013, etc.), a respected journalist and novelist who admits that he initially intended to exploit his relationship with his subject for a book but belatedly discovered that his subject had been exploiting him. "What a perfect mark I'd been," writes the author. "Rationalizing, justifying, imagining. I'd worked as hard at being conned by him as he had at conning me." The story begins, oddly enough, with the author agreeing to deliver a crippled dog from his home in Montana to the stranger with the famous surname in Manhattan. Why? He was having some financial troubles, and this unlikely scenario might result in a book. One would think that a writer with this much journalistic experience and accomplishment might do some basic background checking, yet he not only fell for the increasingly outlandish stories his source spun, he also decided to protect the relationship by refusing to write about it, even though, on first meeting, he found the purported Rockefeller "instantly annoying." The author also describes using Ritalin to meet deadlines and Ambien to catch a few hours of sleep, carrying a gun while on assignment, marrying a girl little more than half his age after a whirlwind courtship and basically establishing himself as an unreliable narrator of a nonfiction book. After initially defending his friend's identity against mounting evidence to the contrary, he decided to cash in: "He was conning me, but I was also conning him. The liar and murderer and heaven knows what else was correct about the writer: I betrayed him." A book that casts long-form narrative journalism in general, and Kirn's in particular, in an unflattering light.
Read More Show Less

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780871404510
  • Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
  • Publication date: 3/10/2014
  • Pages: 272
  • Sales rank: 62892
  • Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.40 (h) x 1.20 (d)

Meet the Author

Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn is the author of Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.

Read More Show Less

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 9 )
Rating Distribution

5 Star

(1)

4 Star

(4)

3 Star

(2)

2 Star

(1)

1 Star

(1)
Sort by: Showing all of 9 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted Sun Mar 30 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Well-written but self-absorbed author

    The reviews of this book said that it was an exploration into the mind of a psychopath/con man. It actually is more about a voyage of self-discovery for the author, who has an unnatural fascination with the book's subject and wonders why he was so taken in. The writing is excellent, but it drags on.

    5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Mar 28 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Highly disappointing.  All of the necessary ingredients are ther

    Highly disappointing.  All of the necessary ingredients are there for a great story. Instead, the story seems to weave aimlessly, touching on a nugget of interest only to drop it quickly without explanation.  The book lacks depth.

    5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    The author, I'm sorry to say, used absolutely zero critical thin

    The author, I'm sorry to say, used absolutely zero critical thinking skills when he met this con artist. I'd be embarrassed to write that I fell for what wasn't even a good con. The book held little interest for me and even though it's not very long, I can't get through it. I feel bad for being so critical, but it's just not good.

    3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted Thu May 01 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    An interesting study, but...

    I heard the author interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," and the book sounded intriguing. If the author offered these many insights in a very ordered arrangement (and authors are better at writing than speaking, right?), the book must be great. Actually, I found the book problematic in terms of organization; it seemed to jump around chronologically, and where the revelations and realizations made perfect sense in the interview, here they seemed more haphazard and lacking the discoveries and self-awareness the author displayed on the air. I was glad I had heard the interview before reading the book, as that offered more contexts than the prose itself did.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted Sun Apr 06 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Fascinating page turner

    I couldn't put it down. It was especially intriguing because it's true. And believable. Who could make this up? It's the old watching a train wreck thing -- I knew what was coming but had to follow along because the character was so audacious. Sadly, there was just such a fraud in my family's life who behaved the same way, making up more and more incredible stories that were believed by loved ones who ignored the red flags. Yikes. It reminds me to keep my bulls*** detector in strong working condition.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted Fri Apr 04 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    Highly recommended

    From the moment I listened to an interview with Walter Kirn on MPR, I was hooked on this story. I simply had to read this book. It did not disappoint! The fact that Clark was such a supreme manipulator kept me reading. This book makes you think about your own relationships and their quality. In addition to a good read it is an expose on how easily we humans trust and validate each other.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Thu Apr 17 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Thu May 22 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    No text was provided for this review.

  • Anonymous

    Posted Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 EDT 2014

    No text was provided for this review.

Sort by: Showing all of 9 Customer Reviews
If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble
Why is this product inappropriate?
Comments (optional)