Emma Cline remembers driving past San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California, with her family when she was 7 years old. That’s Charles Manson’s house, her parents would say.

Too young to catch the joke, Cline, now 27, believed for years that the hulking complex was really his home. In her mind, Manson, California’s resident boogeyman, was a sinister, looming presence.

“He didn’t feel like something from the past,” she said. “He was very much in the air.”

That was the start of her Manson obsession. As she grew older, she became fixated on the young women who orbited Manson, a charismatic cult leader who orchestrated killings in Southern California in 1969, including the murder of the actress Sharon Tate. It bothered Cline that his female accomplices and devotees seemed like footnotes in his story.

“The girls and the women involved were relegated to bit players in the narrative,” she said. “There’d be these little details, but I never got a sense of them as full characters.”

Cline’s urge to understand the dark impulses that drove Manson’s acolytes gave rise to her debut novel, “The Girls,” which came out Tuesday.

The story begins in Northern California in the summer of 1969, as a lonely 14-year-old girl, Evie, becomes mesmerized by group of carefree, feral- looking girls she sees laughing in a park. She later learns that they are followers of a charismatic musician and prophet named Russell. Eventually, they take Evie to a run-down ranch where the girls live in squalor. Evie is so desperate to belong and to win the approval of a sultry older girl that she ignores signs of abuse and brainwashing.

The narrative shifts between the summer of the murders, and Evie’s later years as an unemployed, middle-aged home aide who was spared the worst but still can’t escape her past.

The enduring fascination with 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 began 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 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 Manson, though. In a recent interview at a coffee shop near her apartment in Gowanus, Brooklyn, Cline said she wasn’t interested in writing about him as a historical figure. Instead, she wanted to explore violent acts committed by women. Cline deliberately stripped her fictional cult leader, Russell, of the glamorous sheen that she feels Manson acquired over the decades.

“I felt like everyone had heard enough of that story, the charismatic cult leader,” said Cline, who has long strawberry-blond hair, light-blue eyes and a habit of staring into space while formulating her thoughts.

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, California, 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. (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 Manson’s prosecutor, and tore through memoirs by former cult members.

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.) 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, California, where she worked on a novel and supported herself with odd jobs.

Around that time, she decided to pursue writing seriously. When she enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA program in 2011, she had already written 200 pages of a novel set in a commune. Heidi Julavits, who taught 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.” 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 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.