Three-Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story

by Gary Indiana

"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.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Crime, Biography, LGBT, Queer, Gay

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 24, 1999

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[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.

[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

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just heard that Gary Indiana died a couple of days ago and, perversely, thought of this book.

Celebrity can be an obsession; so can pretending to be someone you are not. Dreams can be a trap, a cage, and this account traces one very dangerous obsessive dream-journey that leaves a trail of people dead in its wake, including the famous designer Versace.

[Cleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arguably the great American crime novel of the 90’s. The killings themselves take a backseat to the 250 pages of “how did this guy fly under the radar for so long”. Some really bone-chilling stuff in here. Killer Inside Me predicting the influencer generation

[Neil Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

a bit of a modern rejoinder to Great Gatsby, and in contemporary conversation with American Psycho. that's to say it's an all-american story of self-conceptualization and disastrous actualization. Gary Indiana's death is an incalculable loss for english language prose

[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.

[Kaylee · Rating 5 out of 5]

fiction is reality and reality is fiction - distinguishing between the two is left unmarked.

gary indiana takes true crime and does it simultaneously while insulting it and destroys most of his own reliability. andrew cunanan was made of lies and embellishment — the telling of the story reflecting it all refracting refracting refracting

gary my GOAT

[🐴 🍖]

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

[Timothy Juhl · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Fishface · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

genius. disturbing. compelling. whew!

[Juan A. Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

whewwww ooookay! lmfao he kinda lost me for a second there, so when I finished it and wanted to come on here screaming "MASTERPIECE!!" I decided to take 24 hours to sleep on it but.. damn lol!!

having the first 250pp of your 300pp Andrew Cunanan book barely even MENTION Versace, and even the final few only as if by happenstance, is just so ... the correct choice to tell Cunanan's story. and it's only in that final 50pp chapter, the titular one, that he begins his spree. genius. until then, we're immersed in the shifty, Ripley-esque world of Just Some Other Queen We Know; recognizable, and sometimes relatable, which makes the start of the Fever all the more terrifying and, for us in his circle, potentially avoidable. and even then, Indiana's prose doesn't make the snap feel like a sudden twist, rather the only way out of the hole Cunanan – and any one of us lying for our lives – dug for himself.

Indiana removes the gawky sensationalism for a semi-arch Read, which is interesting considering this was not taken seriously at the time for what then seemed to be too gay a scope, or whatever. and yes there is a lot of sex in this book, but it's fascinating to consider how another writer, a straight one (or Ryan Murphy) could make the story's lurid S&M and all that seem terribly gauche, but Indiana grounds it in the inter-community everyday. and then, in those final Versace moments, when I noticed we didn't get a description of the house, what the steps looked like, etc, I realized *that* is the sensationalist aspect. why do you care what either of them was wearing? the gory details are – and were for Cunanan – entirely internal.

Indiana makes San Francisco an occasional pit stop, and San Diego into a third-rate haven for aging queens and navy idiots not even Tennessee Williams would sic his lost souls onto. he really grounds this story in a Midwest origin and sensibility of Americana striving and delusion, cults and material obstacles to a spiritual enlightenment promised to everyone but largely withheld.

re-started the Ryan Murphy show last night – I only got through the first 3 eps the first time around – and already I'm annoyed at the idea Cunanan was some sort of Versace acolyte who just needed his name as the footnote in a gay success story. I mean, who knows, but I think it's more likely, and interesting, that he just spun out and killed that one famous gay guy he parasocially latched onto for god-knows-why, but don't we all have that fixation? wouldn't they be the one the Voices tell us have a pulsing aura?

woof.

[Jack Varley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have now read three books about the life and crimes of Andrew Cunanan. Without a doubt this is the most creative. I didn't even know who Andrew Cunanan was before I watched the American Crime Story miniseries back in 2018. I loved that so much I bought and read three books about his life. While the other two follow the safer path of true crime biography, this book adopts multiple forms including that of a novel. If there is a comparison to be made then it is closest to John dos Passos' USA trilogy in how it fuses together different modes of storytelling to contextualise its events. Perhaps this is a similar tale of that same America, now degraded and atomised.

The book also demonstrates how little the discourse on Cunanan has developed in the ensuing two-and-a-half decades since his suicide by gunshot aboard that dilapidated Miami houseboat at age 27. The theories which get short-shrift in the book - that he was a spurned lover of Versace's or that he had AIDS - are dismissed (and almost mocked) in Indiana's writing. The novel takes an almost sardonic approach to that which is usually the focus of what Andrew did: celebrity. Instead Andrew's life as a gay man is the focus, more so than it even was in Ryan Murphy's TV miniseries in which Andrew was depicted as being so disinterested in sex he verged on appearing to be asexual.

This book does not present answers to the myriad questions about Cunanan, if anything it raises several more. It takes enormous artistic license and puts us into Cunanan's mind, most notably towards the end of his life at which point the book adopts the tenor of something close to a horror novel; imagining Andrew's complete mental deterioration in the face of imminent capture by federal and/or local law enforcement. Gianni Versace, the man, is not centred at all. He is mentioned perhaps the least of any of the five men Cunanan murdered. Nor is that intended as a criticism. The last thing that should be added to Andrew's life is more tawdry sensationalising.

[Maxine · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Aaron Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen in nonfiction. Narrative, head-jumping, police reports, speculation, research, omniscient pov with first-person interjections.

Starts off and ends with respective bangs, but the middle drags and drags. It’s forgivable though as a function of the narrative, a constant, albeit bludgeoning, reminder that this was and was not the work of a mastermind or someone highly motivated but rather a desperate pathetic creep exhausting his options and the patience of the increasingly fewer people who would put up with him.

By the time you get to the last act and things pick up again, the slugging about of the middle passage seems retroactively to snap into place, makes sense in hindsight juxtaposed with the retelling of the media’s own narrative framing.

On the note of what’s pathetic, I especially enjoy the pettiness that frequently complicates Andrew’s plotting and attempts at escape. Again, the constant contrasting of high and low stakes is done expertly even if the author himself comes off as a bit bored by his own story/subject around pages 160 to 260.

[Sean Dalton · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hard to give an adequate review of this book because parts of it are truly incredible and parts of it feel underwritten and/or dull. Still, Indiana has a clear image of his critique on the way this story was told which kept the book chugging along. While the book itself strikes a strange line between nonfiction and fiction, it felt believable and realistic. The first 150 pages or so were pretty dry but the second and third acts were quite propulsive. I also appreciated learning about Cunanan’s victims that weren’t rich and famous but had their lives poisoned and ultimately ended by him. What a dick.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

a true crime "embellished" by one of the best. crimes and criminal and surrounding hubbub provide Gary plenty of rich canvas to work on and in his accounting feel probably more real to life than any of the scandal mongering / paranoia that gets vomited up by the world at large whenever something like that happens. american psycho was like the first movie reference cited and that and like gone girl were bouncing around in my brain while reading. also in cold blood and talented mr ripley, strangers on a train. Indiana can swim with the best of the sharks.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Em Gates · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book with a slow beginning that never doesn't really add much to what is already known about Cunanan. The descriptions of the murders and evidence from police reports really pick up the pace in a compelling way, but most people are better off watching the American Crime Story series.

Little to no insight into the Versace murder.

[Denise Mullins · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gary Indiana is a literary chameleon, seemingly able to twist humanity into whatever narrative while not losing the intrigue that brought us there. Not as strong as resentment (in my opinion) but is a different book. I ordered the last book of the trilogy so stay tuned..

[Adam Burnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Giib Glib · Rating 3 out of 5]

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