This last paragraph of “Love and Terror,” Claudia Verhoeven’s new book on Charles Manson and the Manson family murders, is gonna stay with me for awhile.
The book isn’t perfect by any means – it’s occasionally overwritten, overreaching in some of its arguments, curiously (and ostensibly deliberately) nonlinear in its argument. But at its sharpest, it constitutes some of the most insightful thinking about Manson as man and myth I’ve ever encountered in forty-five years of reading about him.
(The invocation of Didion here is [chef’s kiss]. The “count of no accounts” refers to a Manson persona or shard of his identity he’d pastiched from Hollywood film and used to explain his rejection of linear, historical time.)
