In his 1978 essay, ‘The Suicides of the Temple’, Umberto Eco discussed how the Jonestown Massacre was processed by the outside world. For Eco, the ‘strangest thing’ was that newspapers in the US and Europe reacted as if it were ‘an inconceivable event’. To him, Jonestown was, contrastingly, ‘a matter of flux and reflux, of eternal returns’ which had ‘all the characteristics of the millenarian movements throughout Western history from the first centuries of Christianity down to the present’.

Jonestown had also, Eco noted, been anticipated by American popular culture. He cited similarities between Jim Jones and the sex-obsessed cult leader in Harold Robbins's potboiler Dreams Die First (1977), and the grail cult in Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse (1929). Eco also references Ed Sanders's 1971 volume, The Family, arguing that in this account of ‘Charles Manson's California cult and its degeneration, we find everything already there’. This was, for him, a distinctly American story, rooted in a specific geographical and cultural locale. Why, he asked, ‘do these things happen, and why in California?’

Eco believed that a combination of elements was to blame, amongst them the progressive attitudes associated with California, the search for deeper meaning characteristic of the United States in the late twentieth century, and the unnerving suspicion in the Golden State that the ground beneath one’s feet could give way at any moment. For him, Californian culture represented a potent distillation of attitudes already present within the nation at large. It is characterised as a locale where life is both too easy and too difficult:

In this chapter, I will focus upon two late 1970s narratives which dramatise Eco's claim that California is indeed dangerously receptive to ‘minds made unstable’ and cult-like movements which peddle the promise of new gods and new selves.