The Manson Family's practice of secretly entering a person's home without harming anyone, and leaving just a trace of evidence that they'd entered the home, was called "creepy crawling." They crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties. The author explores how they were emblematic of the Los Angeles counterculture freak scene, and how Manson worked to link himself to the mainstream at the time
It's a fascinating book, forcing us to recognize something we might rather not think about: how and why we have kept Charles Manson and his followers alive in our minds, rather than consigning them to the dustbin of history.-Booklist A disturbing account of the many ways Charles Manson pervades American culture.-Publishers Weekly A capacious, witty, and insightful take on how and why we are still so fascinated by Charles Manson and his Family. Melnick is a keen reader of high and low artifacts, and he is wonderfully precise in tracing all the Manson-related references and ramifications from 1969 to the present. He has a gift for presenting complex ideas in savvy, compelling prose. A must read not just for Manson aficionados but for anyone interested in recent American pop culture.--Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others Why is Charles Manson, the assassin of flower power, so impossible to bury? The answer according to Jeffrey Melnick is that the demon and his runaways carved their signatures into the very heart of a complicit counterculture. Riveting and unsettling, this book recalls another chilling classic: Thomas De Quincy's On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. -Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles Melnick retells the Manson saga not as true-crime investigation or psychological thriller, but as kaleidoscopic cultural history, unpacking how an indelibly American horror story has echoed down the years in our popular consciousness via books, films, and especially music. It's a fascinating book-and as unstable patriarchal white dudes of varying stripes continue to shape the national narrative, an inescapably timely one.-Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever Jeffrey Melnick's Creepy Crawling is a compulsively-readable guide to the American fascination with the Manson Family. Expertly weaving psychology, sociology, history, and pop culture, Melnick's work covers everything from the Family's Freudian roots to its continued commodification, from Joan Didion to Nicki Minaj. We know the Manson Murders have been part of the cultural landscape for the past fifty years, but Melnick shows us why. The book is a must-read not only for those fascinated by the Manson Family, but anyone fascinated by America.-Allison Umminger, author of the highly acclaimed Manson novel American Girls Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America's Most Infamous Family , [is] a contentious, revisionist, often obnoxious, but thorough and undeniably important cultural-historical study of the era's other major American cult leader.-Devin McKinney, author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History