An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.

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. -- James Ellroy 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. The reader is likely to feel a retrospective concern for the intrepid young writer from the Midwest who seems incapable of seeing, as the reader does almost immediately, that the object of his fascination is a fraud; it is a shock, though in a way not totally a surprise, when the fraud turns out to be a murderer as well. 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. -- Joyce Carol Oates 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! -- Edmund White, author of City Boy Walter Kirn has written a riveting account of his friendship with a murdering sociopath. More than that, it 's a deep meditation on wealth and class and anybody's self-destructive ability to get conned by a blackbelt liar. A must read. -- Mary Karr There is no finer guide to the American berserk than Walter Kirn. Blood Will Out is more than just the story of self-styled dandy and 'cannibal of souls' Clark Rockefeller. It's a book about the conniving psychopath inside all of us. Kirn's combination of bravery, honesty and self-examination is powerful and unforgettable. -- Gary Shteyngart

WALTER KIRN is the author of eight books, including Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both of which have been filmed. He graduated from Princeton in 1983 and has worked as a literary critic and essayist for New York Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, among countless other publications.