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In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn – then a young novelist struggling with fatherhood and a dissolving marriage – set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from an animal shelter in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who, one day, would be shockingly unmasked as a brazen serial impostor and brutal double-murderer.
This is a one-of-a-kind story of an innocent man duped by a real-life Mr Ripley, taking us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the private club rooms of Manhattan to the courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles.
This is a one-of-a-kind story of an innocent man duped by a real-life Mr Ripley, taking us on a bizarre and haunting journey from the private club rooms of Manhattan to the courtrooms and prisons of Los Angeles.
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Reviews
There is no finer guide to the American berserk than Walter Kirn.
The story of Blood Will Out is one of cosmic ironies and jaw-dropping reversals… Kirn’s persona is captivating — funny, pissed off, highly literate, and self-searching... 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.
In this smart, real-life psychological thriller, the fake Rockefeller is a zombie Gatsby and Kirn the post-apocalyptic Fitzgerald.
Written with Walter Kirn's usual stylistic verve, insight, and imagination.
An astonishing story of duplicity ... Kirn's exploration of his own complicity in Rockefeller's illusions makes Blood Will Out a bravura account of true crime reportage.
Fascinating... Blood Will Out 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.
Page-turning . . . Invoking Jay Gatsby and The Talented Mr Ripley, [Kirn] shows us the way one individual, by simply dropping names all over the place, going sockless and never carrying a wallet, can get alarmingly far in a country that was founded on self-invention.
A tale of sociopathic deviance that could have been penned by Patricia Highsmith
Walter Kirn's account of this psychopath is mesmerising and insightful . . . The trial scenes are grippingly suspenseful, the performances of both prosecuting and defence lawyers thrillingly depicted.
One of the most unsettling and compelling memoirs I've ever read