"It’s not hard to see why novelists are attracted to writing about cults and communes, fictional or fictionalised: their bounded and reclusive worlds nonetheless illuminate the society surrounding them; they are catnip for the charismatics who found them and the seekers who flock to them, providing a ready-made cast of inadequates entrapped in a febrile power dynamic; and their inherent dysfunction customarily provides an satisfyingly entropic, if not outright apocalyptic, narrative. The less harmful among them can tend to the comic, while the more vicious can be downright terrifying. There is virtually always a great deal of sex.

To say that the deranged figure of Manson has passed into our collective conscious is an understatement; just last year, the US TV drama Aquarius brought a version of him to our screens. Back in 1971, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer engaged in one of the most vicious chatshow rows of all time, as Mailer retaliated to Vidal’s description of him in the New York Review of Books as part of “M3”, a line Vidal drew from Henry Miller to Mailer to Manson, a group of men “conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed”.

In a sense, Cline’s subtly provoking novel is an exploration of M3, and of its effects on women’s behaviour, especially in youth. Her Manson – a similarly delusional egomaniac drifter called Russell Hadrick – hovers at the edges of the novel, experienced mainly by the occult waves of approval or anger he confers on his acolytes. In the foreground are “the Girls”, and in particular Suzanne, their deeply alluring de facto leader, who captivates the novel’s narrator, 14-year-old Evie. Hanging around in the Californian suburbs, waiting to go to the boarding school her divorcing parents have selected to solve her vague problems, Evie is ripe for mutinous diversion; Hadrick’s girls are more enticing than her best friend, Connie, with whom she listlessly enacts adult beauty rituals while ineptly flirting with Connie’s older brother."