Part Three
Crossroads
For both the Barretts and Beatrice Sparks, 1971 had been a dividing line, the year when everything changed. And like the Barretts, Sparks faced a hard question: What do I do now?
It was a cruel irony. If Go Ask Alice had sold modestly in hardcover, they might have put Sparks’s name on the paperback, then sent her out to do some press. But with huge numbers, why bother? Alice was a hit, and who was Beatrice Sparks? Just some Mormon housewife who’d gotten lucky. (After all, it wasn’t like she’d written the diary or anything . . . right?)
The message from Prentice-Hall was clear. Take the money and be happy. Also, quiet. Be quiet.
Sparks pitched one thing after another. How about a self-help book for grown-ups? Or a seventies revamp of Kids Say the Darndest Things? How about Sparks’s account of fostering a Navajo teen?*
Nothing happened.
Part of it was Alice. How could you follow up a game changer without falling short? But Sparks’s writing had its own problems. Everything read like a first draft, with lots of flailing and repetition. Exclamation marks clogged the page, often in threes and fours; ditto for all-caps shouting. Adjectives ran together like paper clip chains: “He is the most warm, compassionate, forgiving, loving, most understanding person in the world”; “Oh, glorious, marvelous, wonderful, incredible, fantastic day!”; “I’m such an immature, childish, impractical, improbable wishywashy.”
Worst of all was Sparks’s tone, which clucked and scolded like an angry bluebird, equal parts cheer and fury.
Alice moved fast enough to minimize this, or at least make it work. (What was a speed-addled Christian runaway supposed to sound like?) But stripped of the diary format, Sparks came off as a badgering, long-winded moralist.
Years slipped by, and rejections piled up, just like the bad old days. Maybe this was how it went: some freak success, then a slow, sad fade-out.
Without a book deal, Sparks had time to kill. Her children were grown, so she and LaVorn hit the road, making a large, lazy circuit of the United States. From Utah, they crossed Nevada, angled north toward San Francisco, then drove south to Los Angeles. For their final push, they cut through Texas, then headed back to Provo.
As they traveled, Beatrice and LaVorn saw a lot of young-looking drifters. Where would they all end up? There was no rainbow waiting out west, Sparks knew, just a lot of concrete and sharp-eyed vultures.
By the time she returned to Utah, Sparks was planning another book—one for which she’d get the credit, not some anonymous dead girl.
The new idea was simple and obvious. Why have just one Alice when you could have several?
Later, Sparks claimed to have interviewed more than one thousand runaways in thirty-seven cities, finally settling on four: Henry, Mark, Millie, and Jane. They talked about drugs, and rape, and new-age cults. About the road and what it took to survive there.
Once again, there were signs that something was hinky. Phrases from Go Ask Alice reappeared, sometimes word for word. Of course, Alice had sold millions of copies, so maybe the kids were just reciting what they’d read. But maybe not, because the problems continued:
How had Sparks gotten parental permission (as she claimed) to interview anonymous runaways, some of whom never went home?
How could a strung-out teenager (“Mark”) recite—from memory—a lengthy speech by Gerald Ford?
For that matter, how could Mark, whom Sparks supposedly interviewed in 1976, reference a television show that didn’t air until 1977?
And . . . interviewing a thousand runaways?
Sparks’s strategy was always the same. Admit nothing. Stick to the script. Stay on message: It’s all completely true.
She called the new book Go Ask Henry, Mark, and Millie. And this time, she didn’t take chances. For the pitch package, she put her name at the top, then added a large picture of her own face.
Beatrice Sparks would never be erased again.
Sure enough, the new book sold . . . to the most unlikely publisher imaginable.
* This was part of the Church’s “Indian Placement Program,” in which teenagers from regional tribes lived with Mormon families, ostensibly for the chance to attend non-reservation schools. The catch: participants had to be baptized into the Mormon faith. The program ended in the mid-1990s.
Divine Intervention
The New York Times.
Even as other newspapers gained in influence, the Times ruled them all like Zeus, its every movement and utterance freighted with power; its every gesture taken as dictum. Ethics, protocol, political heft—the Times was the terminal standard.
And the Times had money. Enough to purchase indie publisher Quadrangle, rebrand it as Times Books, and start acquiring manuscripts.
Thanks in large part to Go Ask Alice, the teen-crisis genre was soaring, and the New York Times Company bought Beatrice Sparks’s next two books. First up was Go Ask Henry, Mark, and Millie, which got a new (and uninspiring) title: VOICES.*
Slotted for an October 1977 release, VOICES was soon pushed back to late 1978, but in the meantime, Sparks did what she’d been bursting to do for six long years: take credit for “editing” Go Ask Alice. The agreement with Prentice-Hall kept her name off Alice’s cover, but didn’t stop her from talking about it, something she finally seemed to realize.
Sparks chose Provo’s Daily Herald, a virtual house organ for Beatrice and LaVorn’s social climb. It probably helped that Renee Nelson, the Herald’s lifestyle editor, was from Sparks’s hometown of Logan, and was inclined to take her tales at face value.
Wednesday, August 24, 1977
DAILY HERALD
GO ASK BEA SPARKS ALL ABOUT ALICE
PROVO—When Bea Sparks of Provo spoke of Alice, tears welled up in her eyes. “While working in drug abuse,” she said, “I came across this little girl, who gave me her diaries. After her death, I prepared them for publication.”
The diaries ultimately became the bestselling and sometimes controversial book, “Go Ask Alice.” The publication lays the drug scene wide open, through the eyes of a very young and often insecure child.
The real Alice died just three weeks after she noted in her diary that she would no longer keep a record. So no-one can ask Alice, but in her own way, she has done what she most wanted to do, to help others not make the mistakes she made.
The next thousand words were a big, wet kiss to Beatrice Sparks, the “gentle, sensitive” editor behind a modern-day classic. Go Ask Alice was “a sacred trust,” wrote Nelson, a trust that Sparks honored by staying anonymous (Nelson’s article apparently notwithstanding). It was Alice’s story, not Beatrice’s, and the book’s only goal was to educate.
“A psychology major, she graduated from UCLA in Los Angeles with a B.A. degree.”—From “Go Ask Bea Sparks All About Alice,” Daily Herald (Provo, UT), August 14, 1977 (Photo courtesy of Daily Herald).
Sparks dismissed the idea of legalizing marijuana (“that’s like saying we had just as well cut off our toe, because we have already cut off our finger”), and polished her stay-at-home credentials. Despite the hit movie, and the bestselling book, and the Hollywood connections, Sparks insisted she was still just a “cookie mama.”
In Pleasant Grove, Marcella Barrett read Renee Nelson’s article and felt a stirring.
Marcella knew about Go Ask Alice—everyone did. It was still selling like mad, and the TV movie had aired several times. But it was more than that. Alice had helped people.
Marcella didn’t want money. She didn’t want fame or attention. She just wanted Alden’s life to mean something, or his death would be unbearable.
She read the article again. Beatrice Sparks wasn’t just a fellow Mormon, she was also a mother of three, and seemed to be a psychologist. And she lived just nine miles away.
This, thought Marcella, is the reason.
* Either the uppercase spelling was meant to add excitement, or Sparks’s authorial tics just proved weirdly contagious.
From Out of Nowhere
In Provo, Beatrice Sparks listened as Marcella Barrett spoke.
. . . son, Alden . . . sixteen . . . committed suicide . . . left a diary . . . could be a book . . . like you did for Alice.
It was too good to be true.
Sons and Daughters
When the two women met, Sparks was her best, most charming self. As a fellow Saint, she could use the right words, mentioning “testimony,” and “free agency,” and maybe adding an “oh my heck.” All the tiny threads that bind a little world.
And there was that other connection. Sparks’s firstborn, Jimmie LaVonette, had died at just six days old, and the pain was ongoing.
It was a special kind of club, that pain. You could imagine it, but you couldn’t really know it, not until it happened. And then it was too big and awful for words.
But other grieving parents? They knew. They spoke the same hidden language.
Sparks agreed that Alden’s writing could help people, just like Alice’s had. Of course, she’d need to see the full journal.
Marcella agreed to provide a copy, even the parts she found hurtful. For good or bad, it was Alden’s true self, and she was willing to share it.
There was no paperwork, and no money changed hands. That was fine with Marcella: what kind of mother would want to profit from her own son’s death? Sparks would get the royalties.
Sparks promised that Marcella could read the manuscript before publication. Years later, that promise would nag like an old fracture, but in the moment, Marcella felt hope.
Dr. Sparks, she thought, is the answer to my prayers.
When Doyle found out, he was furious. Alden’s suicide was family business, and you didn’t share that with strangers.
Marcella stood firm. Alden was dead, and nothing would change that. This would at least bring meaning. Besides, it was too late: Sparks had a copy of the journal. Marcella had given her blessing, and to her, that was as good as a contract.
Doyle stayed angry, and the rift in the marriage grew bigger.
Lost for Words
September 1978
Go Ask Alice was closing in on three million copies. To sell even a fraction of that, VOICES would need a ton of promotion.
Sparks did thirty-plus interviews in only six days, and that was just the California press. The New York Times Company had a big reach, and news outlets everywhere mentioned the new book from (as the front cover put it) “the woman who brought you Go Ask Alice.”
Beatrice Sparks just prior to the release of VOICES, 1978 (Photo by Ralph S. Burton).
It was curious phrasing (what did “brought you” mean, exactly?), but they had to mention Alice somehow—it was the only thing a casual shopper might notice. The cover art for VOICES, a joint protruding from the back pocket of someone’s blue jeans, had all the shock value of a Bee Gees poster.
Print ads, meanwhile, hyped the underage-smut factor:
They cried ‘Mommy, Daddy’ in the dark. Or yelled obscenities from mouths that still wore braces.
They said love in a language you never learned.
Listen as they tell of the lives of four teenagers. What it’s like to have sex at thirteen, to be stoned at dinner and your parents don’t notice, to turn your sister on to amphetamines, to be deprogrammed from a cult.*
VOICES seemed a sure winner. Except that it was terrible.
By 1978, authors like Judy Blume and Robert Cormier had perfected the young adult genre, giving blunt, relatable voice to teenage turmoil. Blume, who had just turned forty, was especially skilled, with a style so natural it verged on invisible. From the very first reading, her books felt like old, familiar friends.
Alice had that, too, in its own feverish way, with a manic confusion that shook the page. VOICES, on the other hand, was both lengthy and grating, like a cross-country drive with motormouthed coworkers.
VOICES was essentially four Alice-style narratives, each presented as a single, unbroken monologue—supposedly the “answer” half of a lengthy Q&A with Sparks. Where were the questions? Who knew? Instead of a back-and-forth interview, readers got four very, very long soliloquies from four interchangeable teens, all of whom sounded like Beatrice Sparks.
This led to scores of awkward setups, with teens repeating Sparks’s questions for the benefit of readers. Take the passage in which one runaway, Jane, bumps into Sparks several months after their first interview:
Oh wow! I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. Sure, I’d like to go out to lunch with you. Meet you in front at one minute after twelve.
Or:
Do I like being a beauty operator? Not especially, but I blew the education bit by trying to be so ‘with-it’ when I was young.
Still, many reviewers went along, describing VOICES as “nonfiction” and treating it like serious research. After all, who was going to challenge the New York Times Company?
One of the few outliers was School Library Journal, which published multiple scathing assessments.
“Beatrice Sparks, author of Go Ask Alice, claims to have interviewed over 1000 teenagers in 37 cities before settling on the four included in this contrived, melodramatic book,” began a review by Linda Serafini, a Boston librarian. “All are remarkably similar, and speaking in the first person, they sound nearly identical. A major disappointment.”
A few weeks later, Alameda County librarian Elizabeth J. Talbot hit the same angles.
“The teenagers are not believable; they seem to be merely vehicles for Sparks’s theorizing,” wrote Talbot. “Statements regarding gays are blatantly damaging. Such melodramatic, superficial coverage of crucial issues perpetrates stereotypes and can be misleading.”*
Talbot ended with a terse, “Not recommended.”
Despite the press, and the Alice tie-in, and the underage lesbian romps, VOICES was a disaster. A spate of reviews, a nationwide yawn, and then nothing. Sparks’s comeback faded from sight.
But as she’d always done, Sparks pushed ahead. In fact, her next release was only a few weeks away.
It was a posthumous diary, just like Alice, but its author was a teenage boy.
Sparks called him “Jay.”
* VOICES’ paperback edition aimed even lower. “Millie: Lost, lonely, she thought she found love when her junior high school teacher initiated her into the secrets of lesbian sex.”
* Where Alice had its “sadistic switch hitters” and “low class queers,” VOICES chose the run-on-sentence approach, at one point describing gays as “fruits, fairies, queers, yucks, shits, and filths.”
Teenage Frankenstein
January 1979
Marcella Barrett was out shopping. A friend spotted her, came over, and said the strangest thing.
“So, you’ve got a book out.”
What? Marcella hadn’t written a book. What did—
“Jay’s Journal,” said the friend.
Marcella was lost. What in the world was Jay’s Journal? Was that the book about Alden? No, it couldn’t be. Dr. Sparks had promised to let her read it first.
Marcella gave some sort of answer, just playing it off, and went back to her shopping.
Later, a bigger question occurred to her. If it was the book about Alden, how had her friend known that?
Jay’s Journal seemed to be sold out everywhere, but when Marcella finally got a copy, she only made it through a few pages before her stomach lurched.
The cover wasn’t exactly subtle: a pentagram with a human skull inside it, then some big block letters.
JAY’S JOURNAL
The Haunting Diary of a
16-Year-Old in the World of Witchcraft
Edited by BEATRICE SPARKS, who brought you Go Ask Alice.
From the introduction:
At 7 AM January 3, 1978, a very distressed mother phoned. She said she had read an article about how I had prepared Go Ask Alice from an existing diary, and VOICES, not then released, from personal interviews; how I hoped both books would help educate young people as to the problems and pressures and weaknesses of their peers, and make it easier for them to consider alternatives and make wise decisions in their own lives.
The lady said her son, Jay, had kept a journal—a seminary book—and many papers and letters, which she felt could be of benefit to both kids and parents looking for answers and a way out.
Jay, 16 1/2 years old, had been into witchcraft, how deeply neither his mother nor his father had ever suspected, until after Jay put his father’s pistol against his right temple and pulled the trigger.
Like Alice, Jay’s Journal was a diary; 212 entries spanning eighteen months.
“Jay” is a fifteen-year-old boy living in the small, religious town of “Apple Hill.” Jay is bright and well liked; he gets good grades, says his prayers, and has a lot of friends.
Things go south when Jay’s girlfriend, Debbie, gets him high. Soon, he moves on to pills, booze, and anything else he can find. Along with two close friends, Dell and Brad, Jay spends his days wasted and worthless.
In a bid to straighten him out, Jay’s parents send him to a local boys academy, but that makes things worse. A pair of academy students, Pete and Kurt, introduce Jay to witchcraft. Using a Ouija board, the boys talk to ghosts and practice spellcasting, a habit Jay continues when he returns to Apple Hill High School.
After Debbie breaks up with him, Jay mopes for a while, but then he meets Tina. Their connection is immediate and soul deep, and overnight, they fall in love. When Jay learns that Tina is also into black magic, it only brings them closer. Witchcraft, Jay learns, is everywhere, spreading through teen society like a dark, delicious whisper.
At a late-night orgy on the far side of town, Jay and Tina drink a drug-laced potion, then rip into each other, fucking with insane, bloody passion.
Soon, disaster strikes. Jay is busted for marijuana and downers. Slapped with house arrest, he decides to abandon witchcraft, but Tina lures him deeper in, and the couple seals their bond at a midnight wedding in the local graveyard. The ceremony is all blasphemous lust: at the moment of “I do,” Tina and Jay slice each other’s tongues and kiss, letting the blood mix, then one of the guests pulls out a small, mewing kitten and snaps its neck.
Jay’s downward slide is fast and violent. He pulls his best friends, Brad and Dell, into black magic, taking them along on hideous, crime-filled joyrides. One night, the trio goes searching for something to kill or maim. At a nearby farm, they mutilate a cow, cutting out its eyes, tongue, and genitals. They fill a bucket with the dying animal’s blood, and Jay drinks it. Later, all three teens are baptized in a mixture of blood and urine.
Through it all, Jay’s family is mostly oblivious. They know something is wrong, but they chalk it up to teen angst or maybe girl problems. Jay’s younger brother, Chad, sees a scarier truth. “You’re not Jay anymore,” the little boy says. “You don’t act like Jay.”
Once again, Jay renounces witchcraft, but the decision costs him. Tina, his deviant soul mate, dumps him for someone else.
A few nights later, a shadowy figure appears in Jay’s bedroom. This is “Raul,” a demon who wants Jay’s body for his own. All those bloody deeds, all that sexual carnage, it was the demon, using Jay like a human taxi, steering him this way and that, always further down, always toward evil.
The demon vanishes, and Jay is terrified—for himself, his family, his friends. What will happen to them?
He soon finds out. Dell and Brad die in separate accidents just days apart, and Jay is swallowed by guilt. It’s his fault. He brought them into this, and now they’re gone.
Their deaths are the final straw. Jay makes an appointment with his bishop and plans to come clean about the occult, whatever the cost. The bishop will surely be able to help him.
But on January 22, 1977, Jay weakens . . . and kills himself with his father’s pistol.
The book ends with Jay’s suicide note, followed by a pair of letters from Jay’s mother: one to a friend of Jay’s, the other to the book’s readers.
“We knew he was unhappy about a few things and tried to help him all we could,” says part of the first letter, “but Jay really masked his feelings to the point that he fooled all of us.”
Reading Jay’s Journal, the Barretts’ confusion turned to shock, then fury. This was Beatrice Sparks’s book about Alden, and she’d made him into a monster.
Sparks had used two dozen entries from Alden’s journal, sometimes word for word, then added more than 190 new entries, including all of the violent and occult material. But the book didn’t say that. Instead, everything was attributed to “Jay.” And Sparks? Oh, she was just the editor.
Throughout the book, Alden’s real-life words lurked like sad little cameos, usually flanked by gruesome nonsense. Sparks had, for example, used Alden’s September 24, 1970, passage, in which he glows about Teresa:
Well things are looking up! Yes, things may be getting better. I might be finding someone ‘to see.’ Yeah, things are looking up. I just might ask her to the debate party if things go right. Well there are times . . . there certainly are times. . . .
The vibrations have struck home—someone grown up, someone of my kind. Someone real. An individual, an understanding ear, a seeing eye, an open mind. Living, breathing, walking, talking, listening, loving, holding.
A few pages later, the bright-eyed couple are fucking at a gore-splattered orgy:
I hit her and kicked her and mauled her, sex was not enough, I wanted to hurt her! After what seemed hours the drug wore off. The people came back into place in the circle.
Panting and groaning, I was led back to mine. Tina crawled over and gathering blood from her cuts on her fingers she placed it in my mouth. ‘Master, Master, Master,’ she whispered over and over. I was too groggy to do anything more than swallow.
Elsewhere, Sparks used Alden’s entry from October 17, 1970—two weeks before the midnight wedding:
But of more importance, Teresa and I finally came to grips about our relationship. I love her and she loves me. That’s all there is to it except that our minds are still growing and this may cause a hassle, but what will be will be.
A happiness, a hopelessness, two children on the wing
A loving look, a storybook, and sacred hymns to sing.
I have invested my heart. There is a chance that it will be broken but also a chance at unlimited happiness.
But in Sparks’s hands, the gentle, flower child ritual became a literal marriage from hell:
By the single little black candle, which we certainly didn’t need for light, we went through the ritual of eternal slavery to each other although I, the male, would always technically be the master. Then we each cut our tongues and let the blood pour into each other’s mouths. It was Nirvana. We were one!
When the chanting started Martin brought in a teensy mewing kitten. With one twist he wrung its little neck.
Elsewhere, Sparks pilfered the news for inspiration. In early 1978, as Sparks worked on Jay’s Journal, California police had arrested schizophrenic serial killer Richard Chase, who, the papers reported, had once been detained for roaming Lake Tahoe, lugging a bucket of cow’s blood.
Around the same time, fringe conspiracists had latched onto “cattle mutilation,” the widespread killing and/or maiming of livestock by (take your pick): extraterrestrials, government agents, the Chupacabra, or [other].
Sparks neatly merged the two stories, creating a new and repugnant explanation. The cattle, confessed “Jay” in his posthumous diary, had been savaged by teenage Satanists.
First we siphoned off the blood from a careful tiny slash in a vein, put it into gobs of gallon jars we’d ripped off from the A&W and the caterers, trying not to spill a drop. It would be used as part of a ritual when we returned home. Mel, like a surgeon, cut out the eyes, tongue, and balls. Then we had to go for another animal.
. . . each organ was immediately sealed in a fruit jar, and whisked off to the van . . . the bull smelled like nothing I’d ever smelled before and made strange gurgling sounds in his throat and belly even though he was dead.
And that wasn’t the worst of it.
Cruel Intentions
Like Go Ask Alice, Jay’s Journal began with a disclaimer:
Times, places, names, and some details have been changed to protect the privacy and identity of Jay’s family members and friends.
If privacy was Sparks’s goal, she failed in spectacular fashion. Many entries weren’t changed at all, even when they pointed to Utah County.*
Of the changes Sparks did make, many were borderline useless. Pleasant Grove High’s annual “Sweater Swing” dance became the “Sweater Fling” dance, and local restaurant the Purple Turtle became “The Blue Moo.”
Certain changes were so unhelpful, they felt like a morbid game of word search. In choosing a pseudonym for Alden’s Sunday School teacher, Sparks (whose options were literally infinite) opted for “Niels”—just one letter off from Alden’s middle name, Niel.
It didn’t stop there. While “editing” the diary, Beatrice Sparks had several discussions with Marcella, getting a feel for Alden’s life and social group. At the time, it seemed reasonable; Sparks wanted to understand Alden’s world, and Marcella was glad to help. But Sparks sprinkled those details throughout Jay’s Journal, adding clues where none had existed.
For anyone in Pleasant Grove (or Utah County, for that matter), figuring out Jay’s real name would be a snap, and once you had that, the rest would follow. “Tina” was Teresa Blain. “Brad” and “Dell” were two of Alden’s closest friends, Mike Waid and John Lundgren. (Even here, Sparks hinted like a neon sign. She gave pseudonyms to Alden’s friends John, Mike, and Kim, then added a separate trio of pals named—wait for it—John, Mike, and Kim.)*
Some additions seemed designed for maximum pain. When Alden wrote, “What do you know about love, fat hog?” (October 20, 1970), he was clearly pissed off at someone, but there’s no telling whom. Devoid of context, it could have been anybody. Sparks rewrote the passage to specifically target Marcella:
Oh Mom—you’re such a fat gross-out loser! What do you know about love, fat hog?
For Jay’s epilogue, Sparks reprinted a letter that Marcella had sent to one of Alden’s friends shortly after the suicide. A hurt and bewildered attempt at explanation from a woman still knee-deep in shock, it read, in part:
We do feel that Jay had lived a pretty full life in his short 16 1/2 years because he had tremendous abilities and was such an intense person. He was a very deep thinker and was so far ahead in his intelligence that I’m sure he will advance much faster with his Heavenly Father than he could on this earth. He was a very choice child on earth and we were so happy to have had him with us for the 16 1/2 years that we did.
For anyone who knew Marcella, the letter sealed things; it was her language to a T. Coming in Jay’s final pages, it seemed to endorse the entire book. Sparks had made Marcella complicit.
The Barretts were sick with anger, but weren’t sure how to respond. The book was already out; people were buying it, taking it home, passing it around.
Scott wanted some kind of action. Maybe a lawsuit, or a public statement. Anything but silence.
Doyle and Marcella disagreed. They were old-fashioned, and thought lawsuits were sleazy. Decent people didn’t drag lawyers into personal affairs. As for a public statement, Doyle hadn’t wanted to share Alden’s diary in the first place, and he certainly didn’t want any more attention.
Scott protested, but Doyle and Marcella held firm. Why fan the flames? Just let it vanish. Besides, this book is crazy. Possessed house cats. Levitation. Who could believe such nonsense?
The answer, it turned out, was lots of people.
* Alden had briefly interned at local radio station KOVO, and Sparks kept the reference intact, including the station’s call letters. Even in a pre-internet era, that one detail was enough to decode everything else, revealing Pleasant Grove as the real-life “Apple Hill.”
* In the decade following Alden’s suicide, Mike Waid and John Lundgren had died in separate traffic accidents: Waid in 1971, Lundgren in 1976. To fit Jay’s narrative, Sparks changed this chronology by several years and linked both deaths to witchcraft.
Faith in the Devil
Sunday, April 8, 1979
This terrifying journal is not fiction,” began the review in Sunday’s Chattanooga Times. “It’s edited from the real journal of a 16-year-old, and it’s a book that parents should read.”
The reviewer, Stan Gillespie, had a master’s in literature, and chaired the English department at a Tennessee prep school, where he specialized in the works of William Faulkner. He was also a devout Christian, and he embraced Jay’s premise without hesitation.
The book’s value is that it argues the possibility of a real occult terror in schools, an insidious power that can entice a youngster down a one-way road to fragmentation and death.
This is a book that parents of young children should read.
At Alabama’s Anniston Star, Barbara Hall reviewed Jay with equal credulity:
It was Jay’s mother herself who set professional counselor and bestselling author Beatrice Sparks to work on this heartbreaking little book, excerpted from the diary of a 16-year-old boy who killed himself after some months of contact with practitioners of the occult.
Similar in style to the devastating Go Ask Alice, the real-life journal of a young drug addict, this new book is the same vivid picture of a mind in torment.
Writing in the Fresno Bee, reviewer Alan Lott described Jay’s “helpless plunge into witchcraft” before adding, “It’s hard to remember the book is not fiction.”
Powerful trade magazine Publishers Weekly had set the tone months earlier, reviewing Jay’s Journal just prior to Christmas 1978:
This is a compelling document, more mesmerizing than fiction, with implications too frightening to forget. Parents of teenagers, no matter how rational and skeptical they may be, must read this journal with a gnawing fear about what their own children may be experiencing and concealing. (Sparks previously edited Go Ask Alice.)
Speaking to the Minneapolis Star’s Jim Adams, Beatrice Sparks described her edits as “deleting a few accounts about household chores, adding a few clarifying words, and correcting punctuation.” The real work, it seemed, had been facing down the forces of evil:
Sparks said she confirmed accounts in the diary by talking with teenagers mentioned in the diary. And she saw them demonstrate occult mental powers by straightening bobby pins, pulling a spoon across a table, and levitating a pocket notebook in a restaurant.
“I felt all over for strings,” said Sparks, a drug counselor. “It puts goose bumps on me just to talk about it. I don’t understand it, but it works.”
Linger on that for a moment. Beatrice Sparks, speaking on record to a mainstream reporter, claimed that a bunch of kids in Pleasant Grove sat across from her, in a restaurant, and levitated a notebook.
Did Jim Adams, who had a master’s degree in journalism, take issue with this?
He did not. Nor did he strike a neutral position. Rather, he spent twelve paragraphs recounting Jay’s “journey into an evil world of witches’ covens, orgies, animal sacrifice, [and] blood baptism.” Then, for good measure, Adams identified Jay as “a 16-year-old youth from a small community near Provo,” a detail he likely got from Sparks herself.*
Of all the early reviews, the most damning praise came from the Chronicle of Higher Education, a small but influential newspaper aimed at college faculty and administrators.
Writing just three months after the Jonestown massacre, in which nine hundred cult members—including countless children—had committed ritual suicide in South America, Chronicle reviewer Allen Lacy praised Jay’s “ring of authenticity and truth,” adding, “in reading Jay’s Journal, I was constantly reminded of what happened in Guyana.”
Alden Barrett, eight years dead, had now been tacitly compared to Jim Jones, the architect of a thousand-person slaughter.
Not everyone was so blinkered. A handful of critics found Jay’s Journal not just ludicrous, but actively loathsome.
“Occasionally a YA book comes along which is so deplorable one does not know whether to ignore it (and hope not too many people notice it) or to attack it,” began Sheila Schwartz’s review in the High/Low Report, a newsletter focused on at-risk/struggling readers.
The High/Low Report had been one of the few outlets to question Alice’s authenticity, and Schwartz, a professor of English education, took the same tack with Jay’s Journal:
On the cover it says, “edited by Beatrice Sparks.” Inside, the author credit is “by Beatrice Sparks.” Has Sparks edited a real journal or made one up? The same confusion existed with Sparks’ previous overrated work, Go Ask Alice.
In blurring the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, it comes off simultaneously as fraudulent and idiotic.
Jay’s Journal was, Schwartz concluded, “a disgrace.”
* Even if you accepted Jay’s plot at face value, Sparks’s claim of mere “editing” didn’t hold up. At one point, Jay’s Journal quotes a real-life news article (“Voodoo in Africa and the United States,” by Ken Golden), which first appeared in December 1977—eleven months after Jay supposedly died.
Don’t Believe the Truth
So there you are, standing in the bookstore, looking at the new releases. Fiction, nonfiction, memoir, anthology—how can you tell them apart?
At first, it seems easy. Check the back cover, or maybe the spine, or that inside page with all the tiny print.
But what if the book is unlabeled, like the Prentice-Hall hardcover of Go Ask Alice?
What if there’s no “fiction” or “nonfiction” label, but the cover says “a real diary,” like the Alice paperbacks?
Here’s a good one: What if the front cover says “a real diary,” the spine says “autobiography,” and the inside page says “fiction”? Avon’s 1982 edition of Alice is printed exactly that way, with zero explanation.
What if the labels disappear again (as they did a decade later), leaving just “a real diary” and “Anonymous,” with no other info?
Ah—but maybe you live in the internet era, and information is yours for the asking. Seek, and ye shall find. You go online, search the Library of Congress database, and find the entry for Go Ask Alice.
“Fiction.”
Bam! Case closed.
Except, wait, because here’s a second Library of Congress entry for Go Ask Alice, and this one says “not fiction.” That’s the actual designation: “not fiction.”
You look again. Is it a different book with the same title? No, it’s the very same Go Ask Alice.
So now, for this one book, there are two conflicting Library of Congress entries, a hardcover with no information, millions of paperbacks saying “a real diary,” and at least one edition that doesn’t even agree with itself.
What the hell is going on here?
In the United States, where products must accurately disclose their contents, books are a towering exception. It’s essentially an honor system, and like any honor system, it only governs the people who don’t need it.
The outcome is about what you’d expect, only worse. Authors and publishers lie with casual frequency, pushing fiction as fact and vice versa. At times, they omit the labels entirely, leaving readers—of whatever age—to simply guess at a book’s veracity.
Not that the labels are really much use. Terms like “fiction” and “memoir” are just marketing handles, with no fixed meaning or legal weight, and there’s no real penalty for lying, especially for publishers, who are typically indemnified by contract. There might be some bad press, but that’s mostly a problem for authors; customers don’t care who published a book.
Even honest writers can be tarred by this process. Reprints, paperbacks, foreign editions, e-books—all require some kind of revamp and pass through dozens of hands in the process. Before long, a book originally labeled “fiction” is “inspirational,” or “memoir,” or whatever sold well last quarter.
In a pinch, you can always consult the Library of Congress, whose catalog is the closest thing to definitive.*
But even those entries are unreliable; not necessarily wrong, but nothing you’d want to bet the mortgage on.
Catalogers and librarians—who are truly among the world’s unsung heroes—generally do their best to stay objective when classifying new materials. In cataloging lingo, they call this “presenting the book as the book presents itself,” and it means taking the claims at face value. If a book purports to be nonfiction, you file it under nonfiction, whatever your own suspicions.
On occasion, a cataloger will overrule an author’s (or publisher’s) wishes, classifying an alleged memoir as “fiction,” or noting that Author X is actually Author Y writing under a pseudonym. Likewise, if a book stays in print long enough, it might change publishers, or get an expanded anniversary edition, or be adapted into a graphic novel—any of which might require a new entry by a different cataloger, who might have a different approach. This is how the same book can end up with multiple (and conflicting) “official” entries, à la Go Ask Alice.
But those are exceptions. In most cases, librarians and catalogers take authors and publishers at their word and classify books accordingly. Which would be fine if authors and publishers could simply be trusted. But, of course, they can’t.
Which brings us to Jay’s Journal.
Take a deep breath, then try to work through the following:
Jay clearly isn’t a true story, but big chunks of it are real—real enough to find the actual house, the actual gravesite, the actual family still trying to cope. The suicide note is real. The letter from “Jay’s” mother is real. Most of the characters can be directly traced to actual people—some of them still alive and breathing. And it holds two dozen of Alden Barrett’s diary entries, many of them largely unchanged.
Across the country, reviewers treated Jay as authentic, often explicitly saying, “This book is not fiction.” Jay’s publisher, Times Books, was apparently fine with this, and made no effort to stop or correct it.
Jay’s copyright page, however, says “fiction,” and the Library of Congress initially filed it under “witchcraft” (later moving it to “criminology,” which makes even less sense).
Beatrice Sparks, meanwhile, presented the book as gospel truth. In every interview and promo blurb, she flatly declared it: Jay really existed, and this is his story.
And, sure enough, at Sparks’s home in Provo, she had a copy of Alden’s journal, along with notes from Marcella, letters from Alden’s friends, and more, much of which ended up in the finished book.
And yet . . . on Jay’s federal copyright application (the paperwork filed with the US government), both Beatrice Sparks and Times Books stated point-blank that Jay’s Journal contained no preexisting material.
From the federal copyright application for Jay’s Journal as filed by the New York Times Company (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Copyright Office).
The whole thing was, in other words, a massive, misleading clusterfuck—one that was almost impossible to unravel.*
In most industries, this would be a shitstorm. In publishing, it’s barely an anecdote, and that’s the real warning. When obvious fraud no longer rates attention, let alone rebuke, things get ugly fast, and even good people can believe the very worst.
* The tiny-print info on a book’s copyright page (the ISBN number, one-sentence summary, Dewey Decimal number, etc.) is called the “Cataloging-in-Publication data block,” and comes from the Library of Congress. CiP data blocks are time-savers for publishers, who would otherwise have to send the info to every individual library and bookseller in the nation, but it’s an all-or-nothing deal: the publisher can omit the data block entirely, but can’t change it.
* Jay’s copyright application was signed and submitted by Pamela A. Lyons, the production editor at Times Books. Lyons’s work on Jay’s Journal was aided by assistant editor Joanna Ekman. Both Lyons and Ekman declined to speak with me. (Or so I infer: Pamela Lyons’s husband screened her incoming calls, but always promised to “give her the message.” Joanna Ekman received my interview requests, including one she had to sign for, but never responded at all, even to say bug off.)
Everybody Knows
Scott Barrett was barely nineteen when the stories started. Like the one about a secret chamber underneath Pleasant Grove High, where covens gathered for spellcasting. Or about the green light that surrounded Jay’s tombstone. Or about Jay’s long-ago plans to dose the town’s water with LSD.
Sometimes the stories were about Jay, and sometimes they were about Alden. Sometimes it was a mix, with the teller adding, “His real name was Alden Barrett. He lived on 550 South.”
What to do? Step in and say something? Hey, he was my brother. None of that’s true. But that would only prompt strange looks and all kinds of questions. So he’d usually let it pass.
Alden’s little sister, Elaine, had worked to process his death, doing years of therapy with Alden’s former psychiatrist. At Pleasant Grove High, she made the honor roll and landed roles in several plays and musicals. By the time she started her junior year in 1978, it looked like the past might really stay buried.
Then Jay’s Journal appeared.
For Elaine’s final stretch at PGHS, whispers trailed her like hungry cats. Even the silences were telling—the sudden gaps of halted gossip.
She kept smiling and kept walking. One day at a time.
Midway through her senior year, Elaine married a man named Mike. He was twenty-two, tall, good looking, and in the Naval Reserve. By then, Elaine was two days shy of eighteen and nearly done with high school. The week of her wedding, Jay came out in paperback, but at least she had someone to lean on.
When graduation came, everyone passed around yearbooks, signing their names and pledging eternal friendship. And there, on the very last page, was a recap of the year’s biggest stories:
•In Olympic Hockey, the USA stunned the world by upsetting Russia, 4–3 and then winning the Gold by beating Finland, 4–2.
•January’s record snowfall lasted two weeks and then the rains came. Areas of Utah were flooded but Southern California and Arizona were hardest hit.
•Jay’s Journal, the story of Alden Barrett, former PGHS student, was widely read during February and March. The book was taken from Alden’s personal journal.
Things started appearing at Alden’s gravesite. Sometimes notes or graffiti, sometimes just trash. Neighbors complained that the grave was a nuisance; it attracted too much attention.
The Barretts tried to keep the headstone clean. That got harder when someone put a pair of black candles on top and burned them all the way down, the wax running into every crack and crevice.
No sooner had they scraped it away than it happened again. This time, the wax was red and drippy and slightly viscous. Almost like it wasn’t wax at all.
Scott obsessed, checking the headstone every few days. At one point, he noticed a kid who always seemed to be there. He was young—maybe sixteen—and he sat close to the tombstone, sometimes leaning forward to touch it, tracing his hands over Alden’s photo.
Scott struck up a conversation, and things took a weird turn. The kid had some kind of homemade shrine to Alden, and apparently even prayed to it. That was enough. Scott steered him to a psychiatrist.
After failing to save Alden, the Barretts now faced another horror: his rebranding as evil incarnate.
Atheists and skeptics could roll their eyes, but they were—and are—a minority. At the turn of the twenty-first century, according to a Gallup poll, 68 percent of Americans believed the Devil was a literal, sentient being, with another 12 percent calling it “possible.”*
In Utah County, circa 1979, the number was more than 90 percent. In that setting, Alden’s misdeeds—his drug use and arrest, his long hair, his comments about the Church—made a horrible retrospective sense.
Six years earlier, The Exorcist had struck many Americans as utterly plausible, cementing their fear of demonic possession. Now it was happening again, with one major difference. The girl in The Exorcist had been taken over, possessed against her will. Jay, on the other hand, had sought out the darkness. Jay had asked for it.
To some people, that made him a monster. To some, it made him an outlaw. And to many, it just made him magnetic.
Kids, especially students from Pleasant Grove Junior High, began visiting Alden’s grave. It was mostly a pose, a way to show off for each other and themselves, but there was also morbid curiosity, a normal part of any young life.
Every town has at least one of these spots. The house where all those people died. The bridge where that woman threw her kids off. The park where that guy hung himself. Serial killers and rock stars, in particular, have littered the planet with death sites, spawning countless books, films, and podcasts all predicated on the same basic idea: going there, standing there, being there.
For most people, the obsession peaks in adolescence, when it overlaps with other emerging needs: showing courage, breaking taboos, standing out from the crowd.
Sometimes, a visit isn’t enough. Sometimes there are rituals.
Teenagers in DeKalb, Texas, drive to the Mud Creek Bridge, then honk three times. If they do it right, they’re supposed to see an “eerie blue glow” and hear the sound of crying babies. In Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, it’s Wolf Island Road, where, if you blink your headlights, another set of headlights will blink back at you, or perhaps a phantom car will roar past. No one’s quite sure, and it doesn’t really matter. It’s the going that matters. It’s the doing that matters. Belief is largely irrelevant.
Adults forget this, of course. They forget it even while packing up the kids to visit Grandma’s headstone. Why not mourn at home, or in front of Grandma’s old condo? And why does Grandma need flowers?
It’s a strange bit of hardwiring, this fascination with death. Strange, but mostly harmless, so long as we’re honest about it. It’s when we lie that things go to hell.
* And those were only the bottom-line figures. If you looked closer, the numbers went up. Seventy percent of Catholics believed in the Devil; for Protestants, it was 79 percent. Liberals were more skeptical than conservatives, but even so, 67 percent of Democrats (the alleged “party of science”) believed in the Devil as a physical creature, as did 55 percent of postgraduates and 68 percent of college graduates overall.
Nemesis
September 1979
Alleen Pace Nilsen was lost in a tangle of side roads, dead ends, and bumpy construction sites. Who knew Provo could be such a labyrinth?
It was well after dark, which didn’t help. Nilsen was interviewing Beatrice Sparks the next day, and wanted to find the house in advance. For an hour, she drove back and forth without success. Then, out of nowhere, it loomed up, big as a castle and lit by the moon.
There were six massive pillars and a dozen windows. On the second floor, a chandelier glowed through stained glass. Out front, a marble statue sat in the center of a lush green lawn, all of it flanked by a wide, circular driveway and a wrought iron fence.
Nilsen just stared.
Why, it’s the house that Alice built.
Alleen Nilsen had been in grad school when Go Ask Alice swept through teenage culture, as common as bell sleeves or flat-ironed hair. By late 1979, Nilsen was an associate professor at Arizona State’s Department of Library Science, and Alice was a juggernaut. Two million copies sold. Three million copies sold. Available in sixteen languages. Now in its forty-third printing.
And what about Alice herself? Was she really a teenage girl? Maybe a ghostwriting collective? Something else entirely?
When Nilsen spotted a copy of VOICES, the front-cover credit jumped out: “From Beatrice Sparks, the author who brought you Go Ask Alice.” Checking the author bio, Nilsen saw that Beatrice Sparks—whoever she was—lived in Provo, just a day’s drive from Tempe.
After a few false starts, Nilsen got Sparks on the phone and asked about an interview. No agent, no middleman, just a call and a question: How about Saturday?
Sparks said yes, a decision she would come to regret.
On Saturday, Nilsen parked her car and stepped into the cool, dry Provo air. Her teenage daughter, Nicolette, was along for the trip, and they took another long look at Sparks’s house. Even in the daylight, it was imposing.
Beatrice Sparks’s sixteen-room home in Provo (Photo courtesy of Nicolette Wickman).
Nilsen rang the front bell, and after a moment, the door whuffed open. There was Beatrice Sparks, in large tinted glasses and a puffy blouse, her hair a golden bouffant.
If the outside of the house was imposing, the inside was startling, even creepy.
Everything was blood red with stray white accents. Walls, ceilings, carpets, marble flooring, staircase—all had the palette of a stop sign. The only twist was a buff-colored poodle with its own matching rug.
Sparks showed off the house, taking them down the hall to the music room. Red walls, of course, plus two red love seats and a small white chair. All on red carpet. It was like being inside a velvet oven. How could you live here?
In the main room was Sparks’s pride: a bookcase once owned by the Prophet Brigham Young. Three full shelves brimmed with different editions of Sparks’s books, including Jay’s Journal. The covers faced outward for maximum viewing.
(Photo courtesy of Nicolette Wickman.)
What would Alden Barrett have made of all this? Portions of his diary, including his screeds against authority, bound and displayed on Brigham Young’s furniture?
Nilsen’s daughter snapped a few photos, then Nilsen and Sparks sat down for the interview.
Up to this point, Sparks had been lucky. When she claimed to be a psychologist, the local papers went along. When she came forward as Alice’s “editor,” the Daily Herald did everything but canonize her.
Promoting VOICES and Jay’s Journal, Sparks had used professional bookers, landing softball interviews with passive reporters. None of them pushed back or played gotcha; they asked the right questions and said the right things.
Then there was Sparks’s luckiest break: being deleted from Go Ask Alice.
Had her name stayed on the cover, she would have done the media circuit, and that might have sabotaged everything.
You told the Spokesman-Review that Alice died six months later, but you told the Florence News that it was two weeks later. What gives?
Or:
Did you graduate from UCLA? Really? What year? [long pause] Hello?
Disaster.
Instead, she was forcibly shielded, and Alice evaded scrutiny. By the time Sparks went public, the danger had seemingly passed.
Professor Alleen Pace Nilsen (left) interviews Beatrice Sparks (right) for School Library Journal, autumn 1979 (Photo courtesy of Nicolette Wickman).
Nilsen, immensely likable and ferociously smart, asked about Sparks’s credentials. Sparks ducked the question.
Nilsen circled back, referencing the dust jacket for VOICES (“Beatrice Sparks has been working as a professional counselor with troubled kids since 1955”). Where did Sparks train? Sparks lapsed into one of her stories about working at a drug rehab. Nilsen asked about the clinic. Sparks deflected, talking about the need for counseling and about her own deep connection with teens.
That gave Nilsen a segue. What was the story behind Go Ask Alice? How had it really come together?
Sparks unspooled the same basic tale: the youth convention, the call from a counselor, the hysterical teen, the ongoing friendship, the diary. The urge to share Alice’s story with others.
Going into the interview, Nilsen had believed Alice was real, or close to real. A friend in the publishing world had said Alice’s parents threatened a lawsuit, and that’s why the book was anonymous. According to Sparks, however, it was all to connect with young readers.
“Oh, there were many reasons for publishing it anonymously,” she told Nilsen, “but my reason was for the kids.”
Even to Nilsen, a fellow Mormon, this sounded a little glossy. Didn’t Sparks want the credit for such a colossal smash? Sparks said it wasn’t about ego, or becoming rich and famous. It was about making a difference.
By then, things were winding down. Nilsen and her daughter said their goodbyes and headed back to Tempe. It was a long, dusty drive, and even the arches of southern Utah got boring. Nicolette had a copy of VOICES and kept trying to read it, but the book was a snore. She finally gave up and returned to Go Ask Alice. That never got old.
Published in School Library Journal’s October 1979 issue, Nilsen’s article, “The House That Alice Built,” was fair and objective, which may have been the problem.
Nilsen didn’t pile on, but she also didn’t lie. When Sparks evaded a question, Nilsen said so. And Sparks evaded repeatedly, using dodgy words and nebulous phrases. (She “attended” UCLA; she worked as a “counselor.”) When mentioning Sparks’s work at a California drug rehab, Nilsen added that Sparks “was vague about the specifics.”
What about Sparks’s credentials, and her claims of majoring in psychology? “On the dust jacket of VOICES,” wrote Nilsen, “it appears that Sparks is a professional youth counselor or social worker. But during the interview, I was given no evidence of formal training or professional affiliation.”
Even so, Nilsen pulled her punches. She didn’t ask to see a diploma, and she dutifully relayed Alice’s standard backstory, ignoring the contradictions.
She also didn’t ask about Jay’s Journal, then approaching paperback release. If she had, Sparks might have blundered, leading Nilsen to the Barretts, who lived just nine miles away—at which point the whole thing could have collapsed, taking Sparks down with it. But Nilsen went easy, and Sparks, who should have been grateful, lashed out instead.
“Alleen Pace Nilsen’s article regarding Go Ask Alice was not only incorrect, but in places openly hostile,” began Sparks’s letter to School Library Journal.
“The article was entitled ‘The House that Alice Built.’ Said title is totally incorrect. Most of the money received from Go Ask Alice has gone into rehabilitation and other forms of helping young people. My husband is an important, respected, and successful businessman in both California and Utah. Helping kids is as important to him as it is to me!”
Those three words—important, respected, successful—were key. More than money, Beatrice Sparks sought elevation, to be somebody. (As Alice wrote in her diary, “I want so much to be someone important.”)
Sparks’s writing, her prosperous husband, her many good works—they were tiles in a personal mosaic. So was her oft-touted education, and she snapped at Nilsen’s “no evidence of formal training” comment.
“‘No evidence of formal training’? I graduated from UCLA as a psychology major.”
After another four paragraphs, she finally signed off: “Beatrice M. Sparks, Provo, Utah.”*
Reading Sparks’s response, Alleen Nilsen was surprised by the fury, but didn’t take it personally. Whatever else you wanted to say, Beatrice Sparks was intriguing.
In the following decades, Nilsen would become a leading authority on children’s literature, writing a dozen books on the subject. She would also keep an eye on Sparks’s career—equal parts fan, scholar, and amateur detective.
The ongoing surveillance went both ways. As Alleen Nilsen would learn thirty years later, Beatrice Sparks held grudges for life . . . and beyond.
* By coincidence, a different Beatrice Sparks attended UCLA in 1920 (when Beatrice Mathews Sparks was only three years old). While it’s doubtful that BMS knew this, it was another layer of (inadvertent) protection.
Bad Moon Rising
Throughout 1979, Jay’s Journal was a low, distant rumble. Background noise for a season of darkness.
On March 28, a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania melted down, dosing two million people with radiation. Officials downplayed the cancer risk, then paid $25 million to silence the victims. Five days later, anthrax spores escaped from a Soviet lab and drifted into a nearby village, killing more than sixty people and hundreds of farm animals.
In nightclubs, bathhouses, maternity wards, and blood banks, a new plague was festering, but would take a few years to fully explode. Those who needed biblical imagery stat could look to the Sahara Desert, where, for the first time in recorded history, it snowed for half an hour.
In Iran, a trigger-happy bigot took control of the government, crushing dissent and creating a giant, nation-shaped prison. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had no fear of death, and actually seemed to relish the idea, so long as a lot of other people (particularly Jews, friends of Jews, and anyone who didn’t loathe Jews . . . or gays) died first.
When his lackeys took fifty-three Americans hostage, Khomeini cheered the kidnappings, and coined a phrase to describe America: “The Great Satan.”* The hostages languished in Tehran for more than a year, and Khomeini made the most of it, mocking the US as an impotent giant.
Across America, more and more people felt a gut-level tension—a sense that the country was coming apart.
The Vietnam War was finally over, and Watergate was finished, but there hadn’t been any closure. Nixon had fled to California and was living in splendor, shielded by an executive pardon. North and South Vietnam had become a single Communist power, exactly what the US had spent fifty-eight thousand lives to prevent.
The dollar was falling, jobs were scarce, and inflation was nearing double digits. Overseas companies like Honda, Sony, and Volkswagen, from nations the US had bombed into powder, were surging ahead, shaping the future and setting the rules.
What did Americans do with this mounting, irresolvable anger? They turned on each other, splitting down the middle over “values,” a catchall way to judge complete strangers.
Gay rights, affirmative action, school prayer, pornography—everywhere you looked, the ground was shifting, and the old customs wobbled. Was it progress or calamity? It all depended on your view, and on your vision of America.
By decade’s end, a violent populism had spread to the airwaves, where it postured as the voice of God. Overwhelmingly white, male, and southern, the new evangelists harnessed a growing resentment: the sense that families were under assault.
“I believe this is the last generation before Jesus comes,” said the Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority political-action group. “All this homosexuality, unisex, the women’s movement, pornography on movies and television . . . I see the disintegration of the home.”
The growing number of working mothers, said Falwell, was, “an assault by Satan on the family.”
In Pasadena, Reverend Robert Grant made a similar claim to the hundred-thousand members of Voice, his evangelical pressure group. “America has come under increasing attack from Satan’s forces in recent years,” Grant told the faithful in 1979. “Satan’s strategy is ahead of schedule.”
To a large slice of the population, Falwell’s and Grant’s conclusions rang true. The sixties were long gone, and things were still unraveling. Kids were defiant and volatile, increasingly hard to grasp or control. You see, it wasn’t just the drugs, or the “free love,” or the profane music that blared from every radio. Those were only the breadcrumbs—different lures to the same dark trap. Whatever your children loved, that’s what Satan would use. And once he snared them, they were his, body and soul.
Thus, as 1980 approached, America was on the brink of a long nervous breakdown—a fifteen-year frenzy that would destroy whole communities, shattering lives with roulette abandon.
Later, when the chaos receded, scholars would examine the wreckage, searching for inflection points.
In Dangerous Games, his 2015 study of 1980s social hysteria, religious-studies professor Joseph Laycock described the wire-crossing moment.
“Many Americans,” wrote Laycock, “truly did feel an invisible force that seemed to be all around them, corrupting their children and undermining the values of the family.
“Jay’s Journal,” he continued, “exploited these fears, and connected them to larger concerns about adolescents. Jay [also] established the narrative of teenagers as ‘brilliant victims’ who are vulnerable because they are geniuses.”
Satan, in other words, wasn’t just after our children, but after our best and brightest (and, the media whispered, whitest) children. Kids who had once been decent and courteous, but who now seemed like angry imposters.
These hybrid anxieties, Laycock noted, were “expressed in symbolic terms . . . and the symbols were then mistaken for reality.”
Once again, Beatrice Sparks had perfect timing, blending militant faith with parental dread, and unleashing a new kind of menace.
“Jay’s Journal,” Laycock concluded, “helped trigger the Satanic Panic.”
* The Soviet Union, to its probable shame, was “The Lesser Satan.”