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."
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