By RAY STANLEY (Macfadden-Bartell; 1970)
It’s no secret that following the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders a host of “Mansonsploitation” films, songs and books invaded our lives. This long forgotten paperback original was one of the first such books, and is every bit as sleazy and disreputable as any trash fiction buff could possibly desire. What it’s not is particularly exciting or audacious, with the back cover description, heralding a “freaked-out sex-and-blood bath that picks up where the brutal Sharon Tate killings left off,” promising far more than is actually delivered.
THE HIPPY CULT MURDERS details the activities of an obvious Charles Manson stand-in, a hippy freak named Waco who worships a deity known as Zember, the god of fear. Described as “a big man with piercing blue eyes” who “could easily pass for Jesus Christ,” Waco, like his real life inspiration, possesses a dangerous charisma. He’s obsessed with finding a bride who will birth the son of Zember, and, together with a loser pal named Whitey, travels from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco to Southern California, where he wastes no time setting up a “family” of young women.
Unlike Manson (in whose case no evidence exists that he ever personally killed anyone), Waco is a cold-blooded murderer. He kills two young women and carves “Z”’s into their chests, and, in the book’s lengthiest and most graphic passage, takes the lead in the massacre of a wealthy banker and his companions in order to get money to buy a house in which Waco has chosen to shelter the family. He’s also selected the house’s old woman owner’s sixteen year old daughter Debbie as his bride. Things get complicated, of course, with the old woman growing suspicious of Waco’s activities, Whitey losing his patience with Waco, the cops closing in and the narrative diverging increasingly from its real life underpinnings.
That last point is especially problematic, as THE HIPPY CULT MURDERS simply isn’t strong enough to stand on its own without the real-life Manson family backdrop. The book is disappointingly conventional in its structure and arc, especially in light of the fact that the Manson case happens to be one of the most bizarre in American history. By giving his Manson stand-in an imaginary deity to worship and interspacing the activities of Waco and his followers with those of Dan Michaels, a straight-laced police sergeant investigating Waco’s handiwork, author Ray Stanley only lessens what should at the very least have been an example of diverting trash. Waco isn’t a particularly well drawn or convincing character (not that I was expecting any such thing), but Michaels is an outright cliché, given to mouthing standard issue cop novel verbiage like “You never get used to it. You get hardened by it, but you don’t get used to it. It’s people, Conners. It’s the way we are.”
There exist worthwhile examples of Manson-inspired fiction (such as the underground comic book classic THE LEGION OF CHARLIES and Charles Platt’s 1977 novel SWEET EVIL), but THE HIPPY CULT MURDERS is simply not among them.