What '80s book started the satanic panic?

By 1980, Disco was dead, Manson was behind bars, and America was ready for a new Boogeyman. So when a Canadian woman appeared on the talk show circuit with her bestselling book about wild tales of secret Satanic cults, American audiences were ready to dive into what would come to be known as the satanic panic. What book turned teenage metalheads and daycare workers into America's Most Wanted?

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The answer is: Michelle Remembers

"Michelle Remembers" hit bookstores in 1980, a time when America was absolutely ready to believe that Satan had a summer home in the suburbs. This supposed memoir by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist-turned-husband Lawrence Pazder became the unlikely blueprint for a decade of devil-hunting.

During therapy sessions with Pazder, Smith "recovered" memories of her childhood in Victoria, British Columbia. Her tales of hooded cultists and elaborate rituals landed in a culture that had spent the '70s watching "The Exorcist" on repeat. For a nation raised on pea soup projectile vomiting, Smith's stories hit the sweet spot between terrifying and terrifyingly plausible.

Talk shows couldn't book them fast enough. Smith and Pazder became the go-to experts on Satanic activity, despite having zero evidence beyond their bestselling paperback. Police departments started training officers to spot signs of ritual abuse. Parents stormed daycare centers looking for pentagrams, finding suspicious evidence in everything from finger paintings to juice box arrangements.

The "recovered memory" therapy took off, and similar stories flooded bookstores - each new "memoir" trying to outdo the last in its tales of supernatural conspiracy. A profitable mini-industry of Satan-spotting emerged, complete with newsletter subscriptions and mail-order detection kits. For a modest consulting fee, these new experts would find evidence of diabolic activity in everything from heavy metal albums to the local mall's food court.

Today, "Michelle Remembers" sits in used bookstores between forgotten diet guides and celebrity autobiographies, a relic of an era when America thought the Prince of Darkness was hanging out at the local daycare center. But hey - at least it got a spot on Donahue.