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Blasblog: William Van Meter Digs Deep In The Bluegrass

January 8, 2009 10:25 am

For William Van Meter, going home to Kentucky wasn’t all Momma’s chocolate chip cookies and trips down memory lane. In March of 2005, he went back to Bowling Green to attend the trial of two men suspected of brutally raping and murdering a college girl after a party. At first intended to be a magazine piece, Van Meter, 33, quickly discovered it was far too complex, and began work on his recently published nonfiction book Bluegrass: A True Story of Murder in Kentucky. To say that it was a heavy undertaking is putting it mildly. “I was absolutely depressed,” he says of the subject matter and the three years it took to write it. “And I got the book deal the day of my mother’s funeral.” Not classifying it as a real-crime whodunit, Van Meter was interested less in the thrill or salaciousness of the story, delving deep into the emotional lives of the young characters. “I wanted to portray them as people and not just as culprits and victims in a newspaper story,” he explains, acknowledging and humbly avoiding the inevitable comparison to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. “Some people are looking at this as a kind of cautionary tale for young people,” Van Meter continues. “I completely disagree with that. The victim, Kate Autry, was not doing anything a normal college student wouldn’t.” With the book hitting shelves, Van Meter now has something to be happy about. Tonight at Union Pool in Brooklyn, the writer is having his good friend Cat Power do a celebratory set to launch the book. “She is a dear friend who happens to be an incredible musician, and has kindly agreed to play for free,” says the Brooklyn-based writer. Well, not completely free. He adds, “I’ll give her a coupon for a nickel off the cover price of the book.”