In my first entry in this series I mentioned how, during my student days at Rhode Island College, I would often spend my breaks between classes at the campus library, browsing various books & subjects that caught my interest (such as Donald Spoto's Hitchcock study THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS). Some subjects at that time interested me more than others, serial killers being a good example, and I liked to investigate various books related to the Manson Family and their crimes, such as Ed Sander's THE FAMILY and also HELTER SKELTER, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. I'm not sure where this particular interest in the Manson Family began, but it might have had something to do with the influence Manson had on the Industrial music subculture (and alternative music in general) in the 1970s and 80s. Throbbing Gristle often evoked his name (see in particular their song "After Cease to Exist"), Whitehouse and the Come Organisation made a few references to him, he was the subject of the Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel song "DI-19026," Nine Inch Nails famously recorded their THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL album in the living room where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered, Sonic Youth had "Death Valley '69," and so on and so forth. I actually have two copies of HELTER SKELTER: a mass market paperback version from the 70s that used to belong to my mother (and which she gave to me many years ago), and this more modern updated one that I got at work awhile back: unlike many of the other books I've covered in this series, this one I actually read all the way through in linear order this year, over a month of bathroom visits (well, it IS almost 700 pages long).
Although I was very interested in the subject back in my late teens and twenties, serial killers don't really interest me all that much anymore, save for a chosen few: Jack the Ripper (perhaps the GOAT of the group), Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, the Zodiac Killer (maybe), and Jeffrey Dahmer are still of interest (along with, of course, Manson and his Family), and certainly I can think of many great fictional books on the subject (Alan Moore's FROM HELL, Colin Wilson's THE GLASS CAGE, Thomas Harris' RED DRAGON, Robert Bloch's PSYCHO, Poppy Z. Brite's EXQUISITE CORPSE, David Peace's RED RIDING QUARTET, Bret Easton Ellis' AMERICAN PSYCHO, to cite a few) along with movies and TV shows (SE7EN, ZODIAC, TRUE DETECTIVE Season 1) that revolve around the subject of serial murder. Hell, I've even written a few novels on the subject myself (the most recent one being 2019's HARLEM SMOKE). Oddly enough, given my general interest in the macabre, I've actually owned/read very few True Crime books: the only ones that spring to mind are John Douglas' MINDHUNTER, Ian Brady's THE GATES OF JANUS, Dave Cullen's COLUMBINE, and, of course, the subject of today's post, HELTER SKELTER.
If True Crime books had a Holy Bible, that book would probably be HELTER SKELTER, which is, after all, the #1 True Crime bestseller of all-time (as the cover not so humbly proclaims). The most compelling murder cases are the ones where almost everything involved, even the smallest details, take on mythic dimensions, and certainly one could say that about the Tate-LaBianca murders: the American flag draped over the couch in Sharon Tate's living room (this was referenced in Bret Easton Ellis' first novel LESS THAN ZERO), the whole weird Helter Skelter race-war philosophy and the links to the "White Album" of The Beatles, the high profile nature of some of the murder victims, Spahn Ranch, and so on and so forth. Bugliosi was the prosecutor of the Tate-LaBianca trials, and thus was privy to a lot of the juicy behind-the-scenes details that must have been a subject of great fascination to the reading public of that era (the book was published in 1974, four years after the Manson trial). The book is well-structured, starting with the discovery of the bodies, the search for the killers and their eventual arrest (and if Bugliosi's book is anything to go by, the police work was often slipshod and at times reached Keystone Cops dimensions of ineptness), the investigation into the killers' motives, the trial, and the aftermath. It's also very well-written; certainly the opening sentence is iconic ("It was so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in cocktail shakers in the homes way down the canyon"). And the selection of photographs is very good as well. Reading this book has kind of got me interested in the whole subject again: perhaps I should give the Ed Sanders book another glance one day.
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