Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders

A MAJOR NEW STUDY OF THE MANSON MURDERS, SITUATING THE INFAMOUS CRIMINAL CASE AT A FULCRUM MOMENT IN HISTORY

In August 1969, members of charismatic leader Charles Manson's countercultural "family" mur­dered some of Hollywood's "beautiful people," most famously Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant at the time. The killers left be­hind evidence intended to implicate Black radi­cals and to trigger an apocalyptic race war. What happened instead was that the gruesome murders placed the entire counterculture un-der suspicion and then came to mean, in Joan Didion's formulation, the end of the sixties. They have been a cornerstone of the true crime genre ever since.

Drawing on newly released archival material of case transcripts, Love and Terror recasts the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. The book shows how the standard story of the murders came to be told the way it was. In place of this shopworn narrative, Clau­dia Verhoeven presents a kaleidoscopic history at the center of which is a far stranger portrait of Manson, the man who became the ultimate murder mastermind in the American mythos.

Based on years of investigative research, Love and Terror rewrites the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, an event framed by global avant-gardist movements and revolu­tionary violence, and an early sign of our age of spectacle.

This history is confused, tumultuous, and pell-mell; it is carnival-esque; and it is a downward spiral into terror that, however, is simultaneously thrilling and repetitively compulsive, which is why the song's refrain about the repeat experience of going up and down the helter skelter is also an apt metaphor for the endless retelling of the murders and the never-ending produc­tivity of the Manson industrial complex/culture industry.

Author: Claudia Verhoeven
Publisher: Verso
Published: 05/26/2026
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.30h x 5.92w x 1.27d
ISBN: 9781804298077


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/11/2026

About the Author
Claudia Verhoeven is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. She received a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in History from UCLA. She is the author of The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism. She has been a fellow at the Robert Schuman Center of Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin.