In August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, musician, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered members of his countercultural “family” to kill some of Hollywood's wealthy, white, “beautiful people.” He also told them to leave clues that would implicate black radicals, in hopes of thereby triggering an apocalyptic race war. Rather than a race war, however, the violence only unleashed terror. Once “the family” had been named as suspects and then as the “love and terror cult”, the case placed the entire counterculture under suspicion and came to mean, in line with a famous sentence handed down by Joan Didion in The White Album, the end of the Sixties.

Based upon newly released archival material of case transcripts, Love and Terror presents the Manson case as an exemplary site for historical scholarship. The book shows how the standard story of the Manson murders came to be told the way it was, excavating its fragmented sources and then tracing the way these were arranged-in the media and in court-into the official version of events. Based on years of empirical research, Love and Terror presents the Manson murders as a prism of American culture, and as an event best understood in the context of global avant-gardist movements and revolutionary violence.