What do the "Son of Sam" killer, the Night Stalker, Brisbane's own "Lesbian Vampire Murderers", the killing of Euronymous in the early Norwegian Black Metal scene and Hendrik Möbus of the band Absurd have in common? If you answered "not much", you're right. Well, you're right with the exception of all of the above featuring in this confused true-crime effort.
Written in 2007, Cult Killers purports on its front and back covers to be all about "the most unpredictable and dangerous killers in history", as well as a look at how the occult legacy of the 1960s inspired them. What it really is, frankly, is a very breezy attempt at saying "Here are some pretty crazy murders. And I'll throw in a half-baked look at Satanism into the bargain."
Moorhouse begins with what he clearly intends to be an analysis of how Satanism and the occult became mainstream through the 1960s and onwards. Many of the key names you would expect to see in such a discussion are present - Anton La Vey and Aleister Crowley are given a long appearance each, for example. Where he begins to fall down, though, is the point at which he tries to link the views of these men and their followers to the "mainstream" of culture. Just because the Rolling Stones had a song called "Sympathy for the Devil", for example, doesn't mean that they actually paid more than lip service to La Vey and his Church of Satan, but don't let that stop Moorhouse drawing out his tendentious links.
Slightly more successfully, Moorhouse also describes the troubled upbringings of people like Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil and leads us to the infamous killings by Manson's "Family" and their aftermath. While Manson and his cult have been written about more than enough over the years, I get the sense that this is the kind of thing which Moorhouse actually wanted to write about.
After this, we move into potted histories of twelve murders and murderers. Some of these, as outlined above, are certainly well-known in the public consciousness. Others, at least as far as I'm aware, are only known by smaller groups. Exactly what the link is between them all is a bit obscure, given Moorhouse's own explanations of the events in question.
To be charitable, it's possible to say that the common thread is that all of these killers were motivated by a fascination with Satanism. At least, it would be easier to take this view if Moorhouse weren't so fond of demonstrating that many of these killers were willing to adopt their Satanic posturing post facto, something he begins doing straight away in relation to David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz in the first of these potted histories.
Occasionally, Moorhouse appears to forget what he's ostensibly writing about. His chapter on Varg Vikernes and the early Black Metal scene in Norway makes the common mistake of conflating Satanism and Paganism (and, in Vikernes' case, quite possibly a brand of Fascism), which is the sort of conflation which doesn't help at all when trying to appreciate the style of music. This is amplified in the following chapter, which outlines Hendrik Möbus' crimes as part of the German band Absurd - Möbus was and is a neo-Nazi if he's anything, but we're treated to all sorts of unsourced ramblings about Satanism.
Occasionally, Moorhouse lets a lack of research show. The "Lesbian Vampire Killers" chapter, looking at the (at least locally famous) murder by Tracy Wigginton and Lisa Ptaschinski, contains some overgeneralisations about Brisbane and Queensland at the time of the murder - 1989. The casual reader could be left with the impression, for example, that Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a member of the One Nation Party. Moorhouse is also quite fond of describing Brisbane at that time as "Tiny Town", which seems rather needless.
Several of the killers discussed here seem to have fantasised about being vampires, and Moorhouse is clearly very taken with this (there's surely a book in this somewhere as well, and just as surely it's already been written). What emerges, though, is a sense of troubled young people who got caught up in their own fantasies rather than any really "cultish" behaviour, which again spoils the effect.
Lastly, Moorhouse includes a brief chapter trying to explain why all of these killers would have done what they did. While this is promising, as a lot of books like this simply confine themselves to a blow-by-blow rendition of killing after killing, he again squibs the opportunity. His nostrums tend to be closer to "Don't ignore your children" and "TV can sometimes be bad", rather than anything more serious.
In the final analysis, Cult Killers just doesn't work. Moorhouse never really seems certain about what he wants to say, and the net result is a confused book that tries to cover too many things and does them very badly.
Perhaps the good news in a book like this is that the bibliography includes a few interesting works on the crimes mentioned should one wish to investigate further. Sadly, the bibliography also demonstrates that Moorhouse did most of his research via very sketchily-written newspaper articles. For that reason, the reader interested in any of the crimes covered here would be better-placed to read the works cited, rather than this one.
One star.
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