I went a bit mad on books about Charles Manson last year. I remember seeing this book at the time, but I had had a little too much Charlie, so I put it off. Recently, I have been reading about James Shelby Downard, and any amount of research on that chap will bring you to a writer called Adam Gorightly. I was searching for a copy of Gorightly’s book about Downard, and I remembered that Gorightly had written a book about Manson.
The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control, and the Manson Family Mythos – Adam Gorightly
Gorightly doesn’t really push any specific theory of what happened, and in truth, there wasn’t a huge amount in here that I haven’t come across before. The Helter Skelter hypothesis is covered, but Gorightly also hints at some of the ideas that Tom O’Neill would later explore in Chaos. Mae Brussell, a name I recently became familiar with during my research on the Gemstone File, popped up a few times in here. She claimed that Manson was a CIA pawn used in an attempt to destroy 1960s counterculture. He was just another patsy like Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald. At this point I would be surprised by any book dealing in conspiracies that doesn’t somehow drag in JFK.
Gorightly is a Discordian and counterculture kinda guy, and I found the tone of the book to be quite similar to Sanders’ The Family. The Shadow was written at a much later date though, and it includes much on what happened after the trial. It gets into the Son of Sam connection and even the Hand of Death cult that Henry Lee Lucas was a part of. I’m planning to do a detailed post in the future on the Son of Sam/Manson connection. I know that connection is probably made up, but I’ve come across it in quite a few different books now.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this book was how it made me feel. It was comforting to come back to the Manson case, almost like meeting some old friends for coffee. I’ve been planning to read the revised version of Nikolas Schreck’s Manson book for a while, but now I reckon I’ll save it for the next time I have the blues. The Shadow Over Santa Susana would be pretty good for somebody who didn’t know much about the Manson story, but it was also pretty good for me as a refresher.
Nocturnal Revelries 
There’s a scene in Oliver Stone’s 1994 movie Natural Born Killers, where the imprisoned mass murderer played by Woody Harrelson is told that his TV interview got higher ratings than all of these other famous criminals’. Higher than Manson’s? he asks. Uh, no, actually, not higher than Manson’s. “Well,” says Harrelson, “ain’t no toppin’ the King.” Enjoy your coffee get-togethers.
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haven’t seen that movie in years. should rewatch
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I have the Writers Press edition of this enjoyable work (which the author kindly inscribed for me), but Nik Scheck’s book is the definitive work on Manson. While Chaos has a lot of interesting material such as evidence that Bugliosi suborned perjury from Terry Melcher, I just don’t buy the CIA connection. If there’s any justice Schreck will one day be accepted as the man who wrote the masterpiece on this subject.
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