1960s
1968
A01=Claudia Verhoeven
Apocalypse
Author_Claudia Verhoeven
Category=DNXC
Category=DNXC3
Category=JBCC1
Category=JPWQ
Chaos
Charles Manson
criminal history
criminal minds
cults
culture
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
hippie
modern
murder
My Lai
revolution
serial killer
sixties
Tom O'Neill
true crime
William Calley
Product details
- ISBN 9781804298077
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 153 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 26 May 2026
- Publisher: Verso Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
CLAUDIA VERHOEVEN is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. She received a BA in Philosophy from UC Berkeley and a PhD 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 Centre of Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.
