The enduring fascination with Mr. Manson has spawned countless books, shows and movies, and “The Girls” is arriving in the middle of a new wave of Manson-themed entertainment. In February, “Manson’s Lost Girls,” a made-for-TV movie about his female followers, was broadcast on Lifetime. On Thursday, NBC will begin the second season of “Aquarius,” a series about a fictional detective who is circling Manson. There are at least two feature films in development about Mr. Manson, who still has a small circle of followers he communicates with through letters from prison.  “Manson’s more famous than ever,” said Jeff Guinn, author of the 2013 biography “Manson.”  “The Girls” stands apart from other treatments of Mr. Manson, though. In a recent interview at a coffee shop near her apartment in Gowanus, Brooklyn, Ms. Cline said she wasn’t interested in writing about him as a historical figure. Instead, she wanted to explore violent acts committed by women. Ms. Cline deliberately stripped her fictional cult leader, Russell, of the glamorous sheen that she feels Mr. Manson acquired over the decades.  “I felt like everyone had heard enough of that story, the charismatic cult leader,” said Ms. Cline, who has long strawberry-blond hair, light-blue eyes and a habit of staring into space while formulating her thoughts.  Ms. Cline’s fascination with commune life stems partly from her childhood. She is one of seven siblings, and the oldest of five girls. Growing up in Sonoma County, Calif., where her parents own a winery, the Cline children lived in a state of happy and comfortable chaos, and learned to fend for themselves. On their birthdays, the children would get a box of cereal that they didn’t have to share with their siblings. (Ms. Cline always chose frosted cornflakes.)  “It really was like a little commune — extremely chaotic and slightly feral,” she said.  She escaped the bedlam through books, and devoured novels by Stephen King and Arthur Conan Doyle. She and her sister Hilary shared an obsession with cults and California in the 1960s. They read “Helter Skelter,” the 1974 book co-written by Mr. Manson’s prosecutor, and tore through memoirs by former cult members.  Ms. Cline found her niche as the creative one among her siblings. (The others have pursued a dizzying range of careers, including biomedical engineering, aeronautical engineering and rodeo management.) Ms. Cline took up acting. She appeared in a few local commercials and played the young Billie Jean King in a television movie about the tennis star. “That was as close to stardom as I got,” she said. In college at Middlebury, she wrote fiction and studied visual arts.  After graduating, she spent six months in Los Angeles auditioning for films and television shows, but felt discouraged by the limited roles she was trying out for. She moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she worked on a novel and supported herself with odd jobs. In one truly odd job, she worked for a tech millionaire who paid her to find him interesting dinner companions. The best guests she booked were a dolphin language expert and the filmmaker Les Blank, known for shorts like the bizarre, accurately named 1980 film “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”  Around that time, she decided to pursue writing seriously. When she enrolled in Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in 2011, she had already written 200 pages of a novel set in a commune. Heidi Julavits, who taught Ms. Cline at Columbia, recalls being riveted by the novel’s first chapter. “What grabbed me was this tension between innocence and a sense that something very sinister was going to happen,” she said.  Bits and pieces of the commune novel made their way into “The Girls.” Ms. Cline finished the draft a year after she graduated, while working as a fiction reader at The New Yorker. To save money, she lived rent-free in a spruced up garden shed in her friend’s backyard near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.  It didn’t take long for publishers to pounce. In the fall of 2014, her novel set off a bidding war among 12 publishers. Random House won the auction, with a seven-figure, three-book deal. Publication rights sold in more than 30 countries, and Scott Rudin optioned the screen rights before the book even sold.  The novel has been buoyed by a handful of ecstatic reviews and embraced by high-profile novelists like Jennifer Egan and Richard Ford, who in an interview praised “The Girls” for its “daring and aspiration” and its “acute writerly attention to physical and emotional details.”  There have been a couple of blisteringly bad reviews, too, including one from The New Yorker critic James Wood, who called the prose overstylized and self-conscious. In a deflating review in The New York Times, Dwight Garner wrote that “this humorless book whispers when you wish it would scream.”  But Ms. Cline seems unfazed. It helps that she is social media averse, staying off Twitter and Facebook, and that she is busy working on her next novel.  “In so many ways, my life hasn’t changed at all,” she said.  Of course, in significant ways, it has. She’s under contract for two books from Random House, more job security than most novelists enjoy. And she no longer lives in a shed.  A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Childhood Fixation Becomes a Novel. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Emma Cline’s urge to understand the dark impulses that drove Charles Manson’s acolytes gave rise to her debut novel.