As you already know I decided to read In Cold Blood as my first independent reading book. So far, from what I've read, In Cold Blood is as good if not better than what I expected it to be.
Essentially the story takes place in a small, no-name town, Holcomb, Kansas. In the first ten or so pages, Truman Capote thoroughly and with much detail sets up what will be the main setting of the book. For those who don't know about Holcomb (which is the majority of readers) Capote goes into great detail about the people of the town, the makeup of the town, and what the people of the town are like. First hand accounts of the day-to-day living styles of the farmers of Holcomb. The introductory phase of the book was a very good exposition that Capote created. Not only did Capote lay out the setting but he also shed light onto the characters and the tone that this story is going to be told in. A very ominous tone is created by Capote that strongly foreshadows a terrible outcome for the Cutter's, the main family that is introduced in the first chapter.
Capote sets up the story in a very interesting fashion. There are two plot lines that are developing at the same time but neither plot lines know what is going on in the other. In a sense it is a derived version of parallelism that is built up in a bigger context. Not only is one sentence paralleling another yet with different content, one story is paralleling another that while eventually cross paths. I think Truman Capote does this to install suspense and the want to read more into the reader which is his overall purpose of the first half of the book. As I was reading, Capote would advance one of the plot lines almost to the point where you found something out or one of your questions was answered and then he would switch to the other and do the same thing. Capote does a great job of teasing the reader with these two plot lines that I am assuming, will eventually collide in a dramatic fashion.
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