Since Thanksgiving, I've been teaching Truman Capote's non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, in English 11. The super brief summary of the novel is this: an all-American family of four is brutally murdered in the middle of the night, there are no suspects but the parallel narrative structure leads us to believe that two men who've been recently released from prison are our murders. They very nearly escape and at one point are even in Mexico. However a lack of money and poor impulse control leads them back to the States and into the hands of the police. They are caught found, confess (although they probably shouldn't have), are found guilty and then they are hung.

Capote complicates things in his narrative making us as readers connect to and sympathize with the main characters (and murders). He humanizes these two men forcing us to question the accessibility of the American Dream, the fairness of the American legal system and the morality of the death penalty. For a single novel, Capote covers a lot of ground.

I am always interested in the prurient nature of the crime and the novel. We want to know more about the murders and the murders. We don't feel the kind of disgust that we expect to given the nature of the crime. In fact, we feel empathy for the murders when the state kills them. It's strange and wonderful all at once that a novel can do this.

We finished the novel last week. This coincided with a murder that's been receiving a lot of press recently about  a teenage girl from Pernik who was kidnapped after a marshal arts class and subsequently murdered.

My basic understandi