Book 120: Helter Skelter

"Did Charlie teach you this? I asked, genuinely curious. Charlie did not need to teach them, they said. Charlie only turned them around so they could look at themselves and see the love within. Did they believe Charlie was Jesus Christ? They only smiled enigmatically, as if sharing a secret no one else could possibly understand."

Dates read: January 22-26, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: New York Times bestseller

I think there's a basic human inclination to be fascinated by evil. Why else the popularity of the true crime genre? Why else so many biographies of Adolf Hitler? Why else was HBO's The Jinx so fascinating to so many (myself included)? The depths of human depravity, people who seem to operate outside the social contract to which the rest of us are bound...it can be hard to look away. And one of the most enduringly popular cultural atrocities that illustrate the heinousness we can't look away from are the Tate-LaBianca murders, masterminded by Charles Manson.

The definitive account of these crimes is Helter Skelter, written by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry. It's hard to imagine a more knowledgeable source: Bugliosi was the prosecutor who successfully convicted Manson and his girls (some of them, anyways) for the murders and sentenced to death, later commuted by the California Supreme Court to life in prison. While most of us are familiar with the broad outlines of the case (particularly the parts that concerned Sharon Tate, the extremely pregnant wife of Roman Polanski), Bugliosi fills in all the details: the people at the Polanski/Tate residence besides Sharon who were murdered, and the LaBiancas, and the grisly details, and a general idea of why. He can't give us exactly why, because only Manson knows and he never told before he died.

The book takes us through the process from start to finish: the discovery of the bodies, the investigations, the eventual linkage of the two sets of murders, how the Manson Family's involvement was discovered, how the motive was unearthed, the charges, the trial, the sentencing, and the aftermath. If you're looking for a narrative perspective from the perspectives of the killers, that's not what you'll find here. It never really gets in the heads of Manson or his girls, and it couldn't, because they never really opened up to the prosecution team. There are still questions by the end of it, but they aren't questions that can be answered from the outside.

Helter Skelter is a big book, over 600 pages, but it reads fairly quickly. The writing is nimble, and though it doesn't scrimp from talking about some details of blood type analysis or fingerprinting as it applies to the case, it doesn't get bogged down in technicality. The biggest single flaw of the book is Bugliosi's self-aggrandizement. He clearly did a phenomenal amount of work and won a case that could have easily gone the other way if Manson hadn't been a difficult client for his lawyer to work with, but he definitely spends more time than is really necessary bemoaning the investigative deficits of the police and making sure the reader knows how much of the case was 100% a result of his own handiwork. By the end I'd started literally rolling my eyes whenever Bugliosi gave himself a big pat on the back. At the end of the day, it's an incredibly detailed account of the crime for anyone who's interested in reading one, though if your interest is in true crime generally rather than this crime specifically it might not be the best investment of reading time.

Tell me, blog friends...what's an evil person/event that fascinates you?

One year ago, I was reading: Green Girl

Two years ago, I was reading: To Die For

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Book 120: Helter Skelter

Book 107: The Girls

"I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves."

Dates read: November 24-26, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Teenage girls are kind of sociopaths. I know that I was. You're just figuring out who you are and who you might want to be, trying on identities like clothes. Everything seems so black and white: you're a good girl or a bad girl, a nerd or a popular, a prude or a slut. Male attention is both terrifying and intoxicating, often at the same time. You want desperately to feel like an adult and demonstrate that you're not a child anymore without really knowing what the consequences of your actions could be. It's a wonder any of us get out of it with even somewhat-functional mental health.

Emma Cline's The Girls has been widely billed as a novel about the Manson cult, but that's not entirely accurate. It does feature a significant portion of plot about a Manson-esque group, but what it's really about, more than anything else, is the heady experience of being a 14 year-old girl. We first meet Evie Boyd as an older woman, staying briefly in a friend's beach house when she finds herself between gigs as a live-in nurse. Her friend's college-age son stops by with his teenage girlfriend, and watching them and her brings back Evie's memories of that fateful summer when she found herself around the edges of the lives of Russell (our Manson stand-in) and his pack of girls.

Evie's in an especially vulnerable spot that summer; her father has recently left her mother for a young colleague, and Evie and her longtime best friend are starting to drift apart. She's fascinated by the group of teenage hippies she sees around town, drawn to their exotic-seeming poverty so different from her own comfortable trust-funded existence (she's the granddaughter of a never-named wealthy former child star clearly modeled on Shirley Temple). Evie's particularly hypnotized by their ringleader, Suzanne, and the intensity of her infatuation finds her constantly lying and making excuses to go out to the ranch where the group lives, doing whatever she can (sex, drugs, helping the girls break into homes in her own neighborhood) to fit in and attract Suzanne's attention and praise. But eventually, as in real life, there's a grisly murder and the hazy fever dream of that summer ends, leaving Evie back in her old world.

Cline has a real gift for atmospheric, lush prose. She creates a powerful sense of mood, a feeling that every moment is weighed with portent...which goes right along with what I remember from being that age. Everything is so close to the surface, and Cline really captures those feelings of uncertainty and being right on the edge of something meaningful that characterize being that age. She also draws a picture-perfect portrait of the kind of all-consumingness of female friendships in the teenage years. It's a tricky thing to depict without devolving into cliche, but Cline really gets at the heart of that desperation to please the object of your obsession. The plot moves along fairly slowly, but the careful attention paid to creating the ambiance of teenage girlness and the rich, vivid writing more than make up for it. I don't know that this is a book that would be as successful if you've never actually been a young teenage girl and can't identify with it, but I personally really enjoyed it and would recommend it highly.

Tell me, blog friends...do you regret some of the things you did when you were 14?

One year ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Two years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 107: The Girls