As with Guinn’s book, Bugliosi offers readers the chance to peek behind the curtain, to understand how Charles Manson became Charles Manson.
Helter Skelter is a classic within the true crime genre, and for good reason: it reads like a novel. Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi Layton’s book is an excellent companion piece to Guinn’s, allowing you to read the same story twice but from wildly different perspectives. I found the admiration and infatuation elements the most useful it’s easy for those of us outside the cult to understand the eventual disillusionment and fear, but it’s much harder to see the allure of these leaders. This story gives you the chance to see a cult leader through a member’s eyes: the initial admiration that often develops into infatuation, which slowly turns to doubt, disillusion, and fear. She gives a firsthand account of why she joined one-in this case, Peoples Temple again-and why she stayed as long as she did. Layton’s memoir is the best resource I found for understanding how people wind up in cults. Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death in the Peoples Temple by Deborah Layton Bonus: I also highly recommend listening to Guinn’s interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, which is full of fascinating insights. If you’re looking for a psychology manual on how a cult leader takes shape and thrives, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this one. We get to witness, up close, the techniques Jones used to recruit new members, and how he kept them committed once they’d joined.
We see the role Jones’s mother played in his development. We learn Jones’s quirks, like holding funerals for roadkill as a boy, and, as a teenager, refusing to speak to anyone unless he initiated the conversation. Guinn exhaustively covers not only the history of the Peoples Temple, but also its leader, Jim Jones, taking the reader all the way back to his childhood. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn
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