Quentin Tarantino’s Charles Manson-adjacent movie, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” has resurfaced the story of a man who has fascinated and horrified America since he and his “family’s” murder spree in 1969. Here’s what to read if you want to learn more about Manson and his crimes.

‘The Girls’ by Emma Cline (2016)

This book, inspired by the group of mostly women that made up the Manson family, “is a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry,” wrote our reviewer. “It reimagines the summer leading up to the notorious Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles in August 1969, and it dissects an obsession — but not the one you’d expect.”

‘The Family: The Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion’ by Ed Sanders (1971)

Sanders, who was a poet, a member of the band The Fugs and a columnist for The Los Angeles Free Press, wrote the first definitive story of the Manson murders, published while Manson was still on trial. Sanders did extensive research and embedded himself with the Manson family to tell this story. His narrative “is almost compulsively free of what in a more literal context he refers to as ‘horse dooky.’ He refuses to philosophize, psychoanalyze or make excuses,” wrote our reviewer, adding that Sanders’s book is “truer and more exciting for it.”

‘Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders’ by Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry (1974)

Bugliosi was the Los Angeles prosecutor responsible for putting Manson behind bars, and this true crime book focuses on the particulars of the case and the investigation, as well as Bugliosi’s salient contribution: dredging up a motive. Manson’s, he deduced, was to start a sort of race war, which he called “Helter Skelter.” The writers’ telling “is rendered, appropriately enough, in the language of a D.A.: methodical, tight, occasionally ironical and rising to emotional pitch only on rare occasion,” wrote our reviewer. “Oddly, though, the manner of telling works.”