THE HIPPY CULT MURDERS
Ray (George Snyder) Stanley
MacFadden, 1970
ISBN: 532-00137-095
One of the things I really like about horror as a genre is all the little sub-genres that can even be divided up more into micro-genres and then divided EVEN more. With being said The Hippy Cult Murders by Ray Stanley is what you could call “Mansonploitation,” a sub-sub-sub genre brought on by Charles Manson. It’s got the evil cult angle, it’s got the serial killer angle, and it’s a bit of a slasher feel. It’s easy to see why this crop of books popped up after the Manson killings. Manson was/is the ultimate boogeyman for the 60s and 70s whose crimes shocked the nation, broke our national psyche and scared the hell out of Steve McQueen.
So, the perfect fodder for paperback crime-y horror, so Manor Books did just that.
Ray Stanley was actually a guy named George Snyder who started his career with a sleazy book called Surfside Sex and continued it by writing entries in such Men’s Adventure series as Nick Carter: Killmaster and Hot Line books. As well as basically turning that first sleaze book into the spy/surfer series Operation: Hang-Ten. He clearly had a love for fiction and returned to writing late in life after taking a lot of the 70s, 80s, and 90s off. He spent most of his career in the action, adventure, hardboiled mystery, and western fields until he died.
The Hippy Cult Murders is the only book of his that could be called horror. Snyder really missed the paperback horror boom of the 70s and the 80s, if he was active I’m sure he would have churned out a big animal book or a serial killer book, I mean every other pulp-paperback writer pretty much did. But here he was ahead of the curve.
And also nipping on the heels of the actual Tate-LaBianca murders. The Hippy Cult Murders came out in 1970 so Snyder had to write this book in less than a year after the Manson Family committed their crime in order for it to get published. That’s fairly ghoulish in its own right. But that kind of sensationalism runs hand-in-hand with horror. What are you going to do?
The star of the books is Waco, a big ‘ol hippy Manson-substitute who’s a nut-job who kinda looks like Jesus and sets his sights on having his own cult to call home. He takes his own personal god “Zember,” who is the (made-up) god of fear in Waco’s dirty mind, his best bud Whitey and sets out a-murdering, craving “Z’s” into people like an evil Zorro. Unlike Manson, Waco is very much involved in the murders his “family,” which is made up of young women, commits. There’s some fairly lengthy and graphic (for the time) scenes of a massacre of a banker and his family in order to get some cash to buy a house. Even serial killers have problems with home-financing.
He starts causing more problems with a woman and her 16-year old daughter who he wants as his bride and there’s some weird-family-type drama. But, yeah Waco’s a real scumbag. Whitey and Waco soon run into best friend problems and then there’s the cops hot on their tail. It has the feeling of a low-budget slasher of the late 70s, the really grimy ones, something like The Last House on Dead End Street or Driller Killer. You know, kind of like you need a shower after consuming it.
The cops come in the form of detective Boring Dan. Boring Dan is a regular sort of paperback cop from the time. He does Boring cop stuff and says boring cliche cop-talk throughout his chunks of the novel. He’s not wild enough to be a Dirty Harry or well-written enough to be the haunted, determined cop that Snyder wanted to write. So, Boring Dan just moves through the book being boring. The police procedural parts nearly completely tank the novel and the more interesting (if disturbing) parts lie with Waco and Whitey and their evil goings on, which kinda of lag here and there too.
This is a slim-book, but it feels longer than the 192 page count. Pretty much everything in this book feels half-baked and rushed. It’s clear that it was a quickly-written book for the publication timeline, but it really affected the quality. Snyder is divisive in general with fans of the sorts of books he wrote. Basically some get his vibe and it rubs others the complete wrong way. I enjoy his work, but even though this has a cover and nearly two hundred pages in it, it certainly feels like a paycheck.
But WHAT A COVER! That’s some dynamite work and I’m sure it sold copies, which is another thing this is a pretty rare book. I don't know all the variables of publishing at the time, but I do wonder if Manor Books decided that maybe the book was in a bad taste just a little bit because it seems to have a fairly small print run. The actual quality of the book probably had a hand in that as well, but that’s one of those paperback mysteries that keep me up at night.
When the book was playing around like a horror novel I enjoyed it more, “enjoyed” might be a bit of an over statement but it was certainly more interesting then, there just simply wasn’t enough horror in it or enough character.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.