This summer, the obsession takes the form of a book. Emma Cline's The Girls, acquired by Random House in a three-book, seven-figure deal in 2014, made its debut to mixed reviews on June 7. A story that's as much about female rage as it is about an iconic bloody rampage, Cline's novel is a page-turner because there is no good stopping point, nor any way to break the trance once you begin reading. The novel has its faults, to be sure. But it's smartly constructed and stylistically thrilling from the first page to the last, providing the reader with a distinct, macabre pleasure of chugging toward inevitable carnage.Cline grew up in Northern California, the daughter of winemakers — near enough to Death Valley and the Manson Family ranch that it seems to have shaped her narrative predilections. Before becoming a full-fledged author, the now 27 year old had a brief and bizarre pen-pal relationship with an ageing disc jockey. Early on, she went the young-starlet route in Hollywood, but gave up after she got sick of auditioning for rape-victim roles. During a gap year between high school and college, she studied for her pilot's license. Eventually, Cline graduated from Middlebury College and then from Columbia's MFA program. She went on to win the Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction with her short story, " Marion ." She wrote The Girls while camped out in an internet-free shed in a Brooklyn backyard, where she had to dash across the yard to the main building in order to take a shower.Her novel is Manson Family adjacent, weaving a story about a circle of women who closely resemble the so-called Charlie's girls , all of whom are stealing for, sleeping with, and bowing to the whims and wills of an idol who wanders barefoot through the rundown commune with a guitar slung over his shoulder. But unlike many a Manson retelling, Cline's book finds its voice in the female perspective — specifically that of Evie Boyd, a restless teenager who is under-supervised during a long, hot summer during which she falls in with the dangerous crowd.Scratch that. "Fall" is too passive a word to describe what happens to Evie. And besides, that verb is at odds with the ethos of this book, which puts women at the helm of power. It's not Russell, the Manson-modelled cult figure in the novel, who seduces Evie: It's a woman named Suzanne, whose snarled black hair shows up in the first pages of the novel, before we even know what to expect. Suzanne becomes Evie's idol, as well as the key to her coming of age. But we are made to understand that Evie's decisions are made freely of her of volition. She is neither victim nor innocent. Her choices are her own. What a terrifying — and liberating — revelation.The Girls is split into two eras: Evie as an anxious, isolated adult — Evie as aftermath — and Evie as a teenager whose parents have recently split up and are too preoccupied with their own lives to pay attention to what their daughter is going through. Grown-up Evie lives a life of seclusion: She is staying at a friend's seaside home, alone, when that friend's son shows up unannounced, intending to stay a few days. He has brought his very young, naive girlfriend. Slowly but surely, the couple susses out who Evie is: the family friend who was a member of an iconic cult. Her story of that time of her life unspools from there.