Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story by Gary Indiana


Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story
Title : Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0060931124
ISBN-10 : 9780060931124
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 288
Publication : First published March 24, 1999

"It was suddenly chic to be 'targeted' by Andrew...It also became chic to claim a deep personal friendship with Versace, to infer that one might, but for a trick of fate, have been with Versace at the very moment of his 'assassination,' as it had once been chic to reveal one's invitation to Cielo Drive in the evening of the Tate slayings, an invitation only declined because of car trouble or a previuos engagement. Versace's friends no less than Andrew's friends were helpless not to make hay off the carcass, for the narrative itself excluded from existence all relevant persons who failed to appear, to put their two cents in...and because the narrative had the force of a psychic avalanche it provided the seque ferom the previous marrivtie, extricated the public eye form the previous keyhole, the Andrew narrative, in effect, solved the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, as that case had finally wrapped up the O. J. Simpson case, which in turn had closed the Menendez case, the Andrew mystery would ultimately be solved by the death of Princess Di..." -- from Three Month Fever In Three Month Fever, his first book-length work of nonfiction, Gary Indiana presents the 1997 killing spree of Andrew Cunanan as a peculiarly contemporary artifact, an alloy in which reality and myth have been inseparably combined. The case generated an astonishing sequence of news reports in which the suspect became a "monster," "serial killer," "high-priced homosexual prostitute," "pervert," "master of disguise," "chameleon," and so forth. In reality, this figure of dread bore little resemblance to the scary sociopath of legend. In following Cunanan's "trail of death," Indiana presents a riveting, fully realized portrait of a very bright, even brilliant young man whom people liked. He had charisma, great looks, and money that he spent very freely on others. He was a sympathetic listener with a phenomenal memory for names, faces, and virtually anything he read or saw. But he didn't fit in anywhere, and he couldn't solve the problem of how to live. He was trying to do better, to come from a better place, to have a better background. He made up stories about himself that made him feel more like other people or made him seem more interesting than he thought he was. He wanted to be loved for himself. The two people he thought might love him for himself didn't, and he ended up killing them. This was probably the last thing he wanted to do. Andrew was compulsively social, and as long as he could establish some intercourse with the outside world he could function, even if he had to conceal the ugly secrets he was accumulating. He could hang out in gay bars in Chicago while on the run, come to New York and live in a bathhouse, go to movies, pick people up. Even after the killing in New Jersey, his crimes were below the threshold of most people's awareness. But in Miami he found himself trapped, the very places where he expected to "blend in" were informed about who he was and what he looked like. It was isolation he could not deal with--and that led to his total disintegration and the death of Gianni Versace. Three Month Fever is a tour de force in which Indiana reveals how Andrew Cunanan fell apart over time and what he might have sounded like in his own mind. Rarely has a writer immersed himself in the mind of a killer with such startling effect. Gary Indiana has created a new form of true crime that is as insightful as it is riveting.

Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story Reviews

  • Russell

    I strongly disliked the style of this book at first, but over time I came to find the writing almost hypnotic and chilling. It reads like a novel and provides a plausible glimpse into Cunanan's mind and the minds of those around him. However, I found it hard to distinguish between established facts and the author's speculation. If I hadn't read a lot about this case before reading this book, I would walk away with a very distorted picture of what "really" happened.

  • Jennifer Blowdryer

    Gary Indiana's unofficial crime trilogy includes this book and 'Depraved Indifference' - goddamn they're good, he's like a human conductivity wire with unparalleled skill. The one on the Menendez Brothers I didn't love as much because they don't tickle my fancy. Read Three Month Fever - a thousand percent recommended by me

  • Andrew

    Hit me with a fast one, Gary!

    "For the author of this book, Andrew is a propaedeutic lever with which to bury the consumer's blood-twiddled nose in an indelible abjection which our society manufactures with the same indifferent butchery as sausages."

    Bam!

    How did I take this long to get into Gary Indiana? He's a virtuosic writer with a weirdo sensibility who at the same time seems to have something of a heart of gold, wanting to provide a more accurate, less pandering crime story than the novelizers Capote and Mailer, and at the same time write something more in-depth than a standard true-crime account (most of which bore me to tears). So he places the story of Andrew Cunanan (something that held my rapt attention as a 10 year old, which, let's face it, is kind of screwed up, and says a lot about tabloid culture in middle America, but which is also the sort of thing that presaged an interest in the darker, stranger sides of life in my teens) within the context of both our various national insanities, and also tells the story of Cunanan as the ultimate self-mythologizer. One of the best murder stories I've read in years, possibly ever.

  • Neil Griffin

    I have no idea why we don't hear more about Gary Indiana. The dude should be in the conversation of best author of his generation, but I've yet to meet anybody else who is as blown away as I am. (Until I finally successfully guilted one lucky soul into reading him). In any case, this was just as good as Resentment, which stunned me upon reading it a year or two ago. He navigates the world of sex, violence, and the media landscape through these books in crisp, clear prose and narrative momentum.

    Three Month Fever is a lot of things: a journalistic undertaking that pours cold water over the heightened media frenzy over Cunanan's murders, which were as much about hysteric fears from the straight world about Aids and the gay scene as about what actually happened; a novelistic imagining of this time period; a case study in the lengths someone will go to reinvent himself in our society. I'm sure I'm not the only person that found parallels with Jay Gatsby and Andrew Cunanan, as both started off from the lower-middle class and used self-spread myth to launch themselves into a class that they felt excluded from.

    Indiana also does a great job showing the atmosphere of the different cities where this takes place. He actually lived and did research in all these far-flung places: Minneapolis, San Diego, Miami to get an accurate description of the scene in these places. He is as good as the Coen Brothers in some of his descriptions of people in Minnesota, which I'm always sensitive to, since I'm from there. Little touches about how Cunanan thought Minnesotans would be impressed and grateful for meeting a well-traveled and glamorous swell only to find them put off by his bragging are totally accurate.

    I'm going to check out the other book in his crime triology, Depraved Indifference, next and encourage anybody else to look at the two I've already read.

  • Elyse✨

    I've had enough. I do not like the author's style. Much too "artistic" for me. I don't mind character analysis but this is ridiculous.

  • 🐴 🍖

    not as perfect as depraved indifference but then i mean what is, am i right folks

  • Timothy Juhl

    This book has been sitting on my shelf for several years and it wasn't until I recently watched the mini-series 'The Assassination of Gianni Versace', that I pulled it down to read.

    As a gay man, who spent time in some of the same clubs as Cunanan and during the same time period (did I ever see him at Twist?), and having followed the whole nightmare search for the killer on television while living in Florida, my fascination with the actual story grew.

    I found the book a few years ago in a bargain section at a local bookstore and picked it up, not because of the story, but the author, Gary Indiana. I've been a fan of his writing since the 1990s. He can be shockingly vulgar, often avant-garde in style, but always entertaining, and this foray into non-fiction was all of the above. Taking his cue from Truman Capote, Indiana weaves facts and police reports and his own interviews with those who crossed paths with Cunanan over the years, then deftly puts himself in the mind of a spiraling psychotic, trying to give us a sense of the fever that pushed Cunanan over the edge. If you've watched the Netflix series, read the book. As usual some things were changed for film to make the story more salacious (as if that were possible), but the real story as told by Gary Indiana is even more disturbing and very binge-worthy.

    I would have given this five stars were it not for a number of typos that appeared mostly in the final 25% of the book, as if the publisher had rushed to get this out to bookstores and failed to proof the galleys thoroughly.

  • Brian O'Connell

    Spellbinding and horrifying. It’s fascinating how Indiana’s emphasis that this is a novel—a very well-researched novel, certainly, with elements of pastiche from actual sources, but in the end quite clearly the product of a literary imagination—actually serves to bring us much closer to the story (or one of the possible stories) of Andrew Cunanan than the cold facts or the lurid caricatures manufactured by popular media ever could. Also, the writing is just exquisite, rolled out in quickening, impressionistic sentences and embellished with sharp, sardonic observations. If this man rewrote a phonebook I’d read it. Can’t wait to revisit this and hopefully read more of Indiana’s work.

  • Fishface

    Bit of a bare-bones version of Andrew Cunanan's killing spree, with little interest in or respect for the victims, except for the one famous person he happened to kill. This is very much the TV-news prespective on the Cunanan killings.

  • Wickie

    genius. disturbing. compelling. whew!

  • Maxine

    I really, really enjoyed this book. It's the type of book that is very "up my alley" but is probably hard to recommend to others. If you have a taste for transgressive fiction and your interests align with true crime, 90's-era tabloid trash, stream-of-consciousness and great prose, this is a spectacular read. Like Capote, Indiana takes poetic license with a series of real-life tragedies, creatively expanding on what went on between the bleeding headlines.

    I've been obsessed with Andrew Cunanan since watching the FX series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Cunanan is a fascinating character, wedged somewhere between Jay Gatsby, Patrick Bateman, Tom Ripley and most recently, Oliver Quick. While I enjoyed Maureen Orth's more structured and facts-based Vulgar Favors, I couldn't help but wonder what Cunanan's story would sound like from the other side, that is, the side that is not entrenched in sensationalism and homophobia.

    Though no one really knows what went on in Cunanan's broken mind during his infamous killing spree, I can't help but wonder if Indiana's depiction is actually much closer to The Truth.



  • Lucy

    Indiana is an incredible writer, just elegant and acerbic with every turn of phrase. There's a lot of good deconstruction and critique in here, but I did find myself wondering what the thesis of the whole book was; if it was really upending or remixing True Crime meaningfully, and what its intentions were if not.

  • Chad

    An odd mix of writing here—not sure I really got why Indiana wrote this book (the jacket copy unfortunately set my expectations high) but this isn’t quite an interrogation of 90s true crime nor is it a standard novel about Cunanan. Even with those disappointments, there are some glimmering passages that are sharp and true. 3/5

  • Denise Mullins

    After viewing a limited series on Netflix, I was interested to read another perspective on Andrew Cunanan's story. Sadly, while the author attempts to capture the voice of various personalities who crossed paths with the subject or his crimes, the narrative becomes muddled and redundant.

  • Adam Burnett

    An absolutely engrossing piece of masterful trash — speculative to the point of stupid, literary bait, a lure for the obsession with the obsessed, a fantasia for the murderous. All too much, as intended.

  • death spiral

    Kinda a new genre for me. I’ve never even read In Cold Blood. Read this alongside some of the essays in Culture of Narcissism, and I find GI’s novelized reporting more intriguing a method for tackling the big issue of hyperindividualism than Lasch’s question-begging theorizing…

  • Stark

    I read this as a kind of penance for having watched the grievously celebricapitalist Ryan Murphy version of Cunanan’s story, turns out I really like Gary Indiana’s writing style.

  • Alex

    For fans of Eve Babitz, Saltburn, and American Psycho.

  • Giib Glib

    Absolutely depraved. The story of an automation out for blood. Ruthless. Reminds me of that song Versace by Migos.

  • Helena

    interesting, a little chaotic, but also a little racist :/. 3.5.

  • Joanna

    I can't really give it a 4, but it's a good read nonetheless. I was expecting more of the tabloid-y aspects to be emphasized, but it's more the (fictionalized) story of Cunanan's life and relationships before his brief notoriety derived from killing Versace. Good, but not really true crime, if that's what you're looking for. If you are intrigued by the true crime genre yet put off by most examples of it, I recommend this.

  • Bridget

    The only thing better than reading true crime about Versace's killer is reading it interpreted through the mind of the amazing Gary Indiana. Like In Cold Blood if the homo-eroticism wasn't buried between the lines.

  • Ed

    did you like Party Monster? A detailed character analysis of the man who would become Gianni Versace’s killer

  • Lily OnTheLam

    awful

  • John Treat

    Indiana at his best.