The Spirit Read online

  THE SPIRIT

  THOMAS PAGE

  With a new introduction by

  GRADY HENDRIX

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Spirit by Thomas Page

  Originally published by Rawson in 1977

  First Valancourt Books edition 2019

  Copyright © 1977 by Thomas Page

  Cover painting copyright © 1982 by Tom Hallman

  Introduction © 2019 by Grady Hendrix

  “Paperbacks from Hell” logo designed by Timothy O’Donnell. © 2017 Quirk Books. Used under license. All rights reserved.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover painting by Tom Hallman

  Cover design by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  Starting in 1976 with the novelization of the Six Million Dollar Man episode “The Secret of Bigfoot Pass” by Mike Jahn, Bigfoot books were booming. And, Steve Austin aside, everyone wanted to have sex with Sasquatch. It seemed to start with John Cotter and Judith Frankel’s “It’s all true!” shock memoir, Nights with Sasquatch (1977), in which Bigfoot abducts Frankel, a lady scientist, for sex purposes before she’s rescued by Cotter. The theme continued in Walter J. Sheldon’s The Beast (1980) where another lady scientist gets abducted by Bigfoot:

  It can’t be, thought Zia. No, really, it can’t be. It was plain enough what the beast meant to do . . . she wondered if he would injure her seriously when he penetrated her . . .

  J. N. Williamson took Abominable Snowsex to the stars in Brotherkind (1982), his tale of a Yeti riding shotgun in a UFO full of Grays who abduct human females for extraterrestrial gangbangs, employing the Abominable Snowman as a finisher. John Tigges may have come late to the party with Monster (1995) but he gets right with the program, his abducted human female cowering from the missing link’s penis as it “jerked alive and swelled until it stood erect in front of him, massive, six inches around, 14 inches long.”

  So it’s not surprising that the first thing you notice about Thomas Page’s bigfoot novel, The Spirit (1977), is that absolutely no one has any sex at all with Bigfoot. In fact, we don’t even get a single glimpse of his dong. This isn’t the only reason—but it’s certainly one of them—why The Spirit is the best Bigfoot book out there.

  Sure, its Bigfoot smells “detestable” and enjoys decapitating people, just like he does in every other Bigfoot book. And there’s a Native American character named John Moon on a spirit quest, a sure symptom of stereotype-itis, an affliction plaguing numerous horror paperbacks. But this Native American’s analysis of Bigfoot, after seeing him raid a trailer park’s garbage, is “Fuck him! He’s stupid!”

  Convenience store clerks gossip about Bigfoot (“Some folks say it tried to rape a woman down on Route Nine”), John Moon covets a fiberglass bow but isn’t allowed to use one because he’s told his wooden bow is “more authentic,” an anthropologist reels off page after page of ridiculously useless Bigfoot information while claiming the manimal doesn’t exist, a ski lodge owner plans to offer his guests a real live “Bigfoot Hunt” with plenty of condoms on hand since the thrill of the chase is bound to make everyone horny, and the survivor of a Bigfoot attack stands amongst the corpses and crushed skulls, marveling, “Bigfoot! . . . Ain’t that something?” It’s not Catch-22 but it’s the closest thing Bigfoot fiction has to an epic comedy.

  Before he wrote The Spirit, author Thomas Page worked for the New York City-based advertising agency Diener Hauser Greenthal writing ad slogans for movies like The Godfather and Vanishing Point. Deciding to cure his phobic fear of spiders, he researched them to death, and the overexposure made him fall in love with insects (yes, spiders are technically arachnids), which gave him the idea for a book. Writing in his spare time, he delivered The Hephaestus Plague, about an infestation of beetles that set fires when agitated. It landed him an agent, who sold it to Putnam, who published it in 1973. It moved a few million copies and got turned into a movie by William Castle called Bug. Released in 1975 it made a tidy $3 million at the box office.

  With that success under his belt, another book on his contract, and his editor asking for a follow-up as soon as possible, Page quit his job at the advertising agency and delivered The Spirit. In the Seventies, everyone was looking for Atlantis, hunting for Bigfoot, and searching for UFOs so it made sense that Sasquatch would catch the author’s eye, but the book was, as he said in an interview, “the worst book anybody ever wrote.” It was about a ski lodge under attack by a band of Bigfeet. He hated it. His editor hated it. His agent hated it. So Page broke his contract, trashed the book, and wondered if quitting his day job had been a mistake.

  But the idea kept niggling at him. He flew to his mother’s­­­­ home town in Montana for a family event and while there remembered that his mother, an artist, had told him that out of all the Native American tribes the greatest artisans were the Blackfeet. Page drove to the Blackfeet Heritage Center and Art Gallery in Browning where the sculpture blew him away. And then it hit him: if anyone knew about Bigfoot it would be Indians, and probably tribes located in Montana or in states with lots of forests.

  He rented a car and drove through Montana, Oregon, and Washington State, interviewing people from every tribe he met. The result? Zippo. It was only in Montana that he finally stumbled across any aboriginal lore about evil giants, and that was from the Flathead Tribe. He also ran across a lot of Bigfoot hunters. As he says of one, “He was a very rational man, but also batshit crazy.” Which sounds like The Spirit’s thesis statement about the entire human race.

  Page’s father, a mining engineer, had a book about the Plateau Indian tribes and while reading it Page got the idea to make a Flathead Indian the central character and to send him after Bigfoot on a spirit quest. After all, the Flatheads were enormously spiritual (they were the only tribe that invited Catholic priests to preach to them) and Page also realized that Bigfoot hunters were on a spirit quest of their own, going out into the world and searching for an elusive creature whose discovery would give their life meaning.

  Since there have never been any prehuman hominids found in the Americas, Page figured Bigfoot must have come over the land bridge from Eastern Mongolia, and there was folklore about a giant ape briefly living in Eastern Mongolia. The pieces started falling into place. This version of The Spirit came together fast and he took it to Rawson Associates, a small division of Macmillan where a young female editor had responded well to The Hephaestus Plague. She fell in love with The Spirit and on September 23, 1977 it hit stands in hardcover.

  As Page says, “It was a huge flop.”

  There wasn’t enough money for promotion, and even blurbs proclaiming it “By the author of The Hephaestus Plague” didn’t help. The few trade reviews were snarky. Kirkus called it “grade B sci-why”. A successful soap opera writer optioned it for film, but Hollywood didn’t come calling. As a friend told Page, “No one is going to be real keen on a movie about a guy in a gorilla suit.”

  The editor who’d picked up The Hephaestus Plague was now at New York Times Books, an imprint associated with the paper, and she bought Page’s next book, Sigmet Active, and published it in 1978. Inspired by James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis that was just starting to gain traction, it proposed that the planet Earth was not only a self-­regulating, synergistic system that could essentially be thought of as a single l
ifeform, but it had antibodies. Connected to lightning, these antibodies existed in the upper atmosphere and when an experimental Navy weapon punches a hole in the ozone layer these intelligent lightning bolts enter our atmosphere and hunt down everyone at the testing range. Page describes it as, “A bunch of people being chased around the world by a living thunderstorm.”

  It did okay, selling to the United Kingdom and Italy, and recently being optioned for a miniseries, but his next book did great business. Published in 1981 by Seaview Books, then picked up for paperback by New American Library, The Man Who Would Not Die hit the ground running. Optioned by Herbert “Footloose” Ross, the director paid famed British scriptwriter, Dennis Potter, to turn it into a feature film. At the time, Potter and Ross were collaborating on the American adaptation of Potter’s British television hit, Pennies from Heaven, but Page described the script as “a dud.” He and Ross would keep trying to adapt it for years to come, with no success.

  Page had moved to California to research the book, taking a day job writing trailers for Kaleidoscope Films, one of L.A.’s biggest trailer houses. An updated twist on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, the book is a love story about a dead medical equipment salesman who haunts a woman after their one-night stand, his comatose body kept alive by an experimental, computerized hospital bed. Inspired by California’s flipped-out psychic claimants and parapsychologists mixing ghost-hunting with quantum physics, it jerks between jargon-heavy scientific lectures, metaphysical rom com, and straight-up angry ghost action.

  Line by line, Page’s writing delivers brisk dialogue and colorful details, but The Spirit is his book that blends action, scientific speculation, humor, and spirituality so smoothly you can’t see the seams. But what really elevates it above the rest of the pack (besides the lack of ’Squatch Sex) is its surprisingly moving spiritual side.

  Page grew up in North Carolina but moved to New York City because he was “desperate to get out of the South.” After he published The Man Who Would Not Die and Kaleidoscope went out of business, he moved back to Durham, N.C. where he’d work in public radio and as a country music DJ. He eventually moved back to Santa Monica and on the way he stopped off in Denver, where he lived in a nunnery while hosting a radio tarot show. In Santa Monica he became a technical writer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Raytheon, and developed two massive, thousand-page proposals for Boeing dealing with both ground communication and the mission vehicle for their proposed mission to Mars. He also wrote and shopped around several screenplays. He recently married the poet, Nancy Shiffrin.

  To Page, the spirit quest wasn’t just for Indians, it was something that all of humanity, no matter what their ethnicity, shared. In The Spirit, it’s John Moon’s quest to find Bigfoot, who will reveal to him his true name. But it’s also the book’s Bigfoot hunter, Raymond Jason’s, quest to bag Bigfoot because claiming the ultimate hunting trophy will finally, he hopes, give him peace. It’s the mythic quest for the golden fleece, the searching spirit of the Sixties and Seventies, pseudoscientists looking for the God Particle, for Lost Atlantis, for UFOs, for Sasquatch, all of us wandering in the dark woods, both literal and figurative, looking for our holy grail, our true name, our place in the world where we finally belong.

  “I met plenty of Bigfoot hunters while writing The Spirit,” Page says. “They’re on a spirit quest. In fact, anyone in the world who has any kind of faith in anything is on one. You go out into the world to find out who you are. Bigfoot hunters, Indians, everyone, we’re enraptured by this mystery of something in the woods, and we spend years looking for it. It’s something baked into the human soul and it’s very powerful, and kind of beautiful.”

  Grady Hendrix

  Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award. You can stalk him at www.gradyhendrix.com.

  OBSESSION

  On a late-­spring afternoon in the Mission Range mountains of Montana, a solitary Indian trudged up a grassy slope to a rocky pocket of dark boulders that overlooked the valley sloping away below. In the waving bear grass far below he saw a spirit sidewinding through the stems. The spirit was a snake made of air, and it writhed up the slope to where he stood. Just before it reached him, the Indian closed his eyes. Wind touched his straight black hair and rustled the flap of the leather sack tied to his waist.

  The Indian lay down among the rocks, his face turned to the sky. Only his eyes moved. It had been seventy years since the Plains Indians sent their young to sacred places such as this rock aerie for fasting and self-­torture. The Indian had come up here to learn his name. This name would be given him by a spirit, a sort of guardian angel, who would leave a talisman. If the spirit were a bird, it would leave a feather, which he would tuck into the fringed leather medicine bundle tied to his waist. If it were a bear, it would leave a claw. In the old days humans and animals were the same. They talked freely to each other and helped in times of battle and famine. Sometimes the spirit was a human, the ghost of an ancestor or a great chief.

  And sometimes the spirit never came. The Indian would not learn his name and he would wither away and die young, bereft of the taproot of his existence.

  On the second day, thirst became a constant discomfort for the Indian. There was a puddle of muddy water by his head. He did not drink. In his medicine bundle was some corn fried in brown sugar. He did not eat. The nearness of food and water was mental torture, which was good. Only through suffering would he gain a vision. Pain would scrape away the walls of mortality that kept him from his spirit.

  The medicine bundle belonged to his dead grandfather, who had left it for him. The old man had come up here many years before and stayed three days. On the third day a man had stepped out of a lodge-­pole pine tree and the two of them had a long conversation about crops, weather, and the bad game of that year. The ghost had given him a piece of wood, telling him he should be a carpenter. The Indian’s grandfather worked with wood for the rest of his life in a pleasant, moderately successful way, building his own home and raising his family. The Indian was the only one left of that family now. A fire had swept the house one night, and he was shifted to the Catholic mission school. The Black Robes had said their medicine was more powerful than his grandfather’s. Just to be safe, he had slipped a crucifix into the medicine bundle, along with his grandfather’s clay pipe, the piece of wood, and the cartridge with which he had killed his first deer.

  The Indian had tried for weeks to remember his grandfather. His memory had been shattered by certain events the previous year, events which doctors in white robes in an Army hospital had tried to neutralize. The events themselves lived under his mind as dreams. Down there somewhere was his grandfather, too, and the stories he had told the boy during long winter afternoons.

  Under the twin attacks of discomfort and sun, the Indian tried as he had tried so many times to put his memory chains together. But they lay apart, separated by bloody gaps. Here he saw a piece of hospital sheet, there a fragment of a troop carrier. And further over there was his grandfather sitting before an orange fire, rocking in his chair and talking to him. He was trying to say something, but no words came out of his mouth.

  The sun climbed higher.

  The Indian wondered if he was out of his own time. Perhaps the spirits had been chased away by automobiles and machinery. But he did not really believe that. He knew they lived. He knew they had lived long before the white man came into the land. They had lived long before that man was nailed to a cross. They still lived.

  On the third day, flies circled the Indian’s head, attracted by the possibility of death. The Indian did not swat them. He had been drenched by a passing thunderstorm, and now it was a race between enlightenment and death by exhaustion. His mouth had dried and his tongue was swelling with thirst. The Montana valley fold
ed upon itself and spun around. He was in a perpetual daze, in which time had slowed down and he was no longer bound to reality. His body had begun to assume the shape of the ground on which he lay. A hornet landed on his exposed skin and sank its stinger in without acknowledging him. Doomed by the loss of its single weapon, the hornet staggered back into flight.

  The Indian wondered if his own existence were as futile as the hornet’s. At the instant of defiance, it had killed itself.

  In the woods above he heard the whistle of a marmot. He waited for it to come and speak to him. He waited as the sun slid over the sky and darkened the valley. The Indian knew he would not see it come up again unless his spirit came. He was too weak to wave at the flies now.

  A velvet shroud settled over his eyes, blocking the sky. He thought about the sun. He cried for it. But all he saw was the hot orange glow through his eyelids. The sun’s heat was heavy, like earth being piled on top of him. Soon the Indian was unaware of even that.

  Something seemed to crackle in the air over his chest. The Indian awoke to find it was night. Standing in the grass below the boulders was a small, mottled mongrel dog with a face like a cat’s and patches of skin showing through its tattered coat.

  The Indian and the dog regarded each other with alert, unfrightened eyes. The marmot sounded again in the trees. The dog glanced toward the sound.

  The dog said, Follow me.

  With the aid of his rifle, the Indian unhinged his body section by section and painfully stood upright. He leaned on the gun. Corn spilled from his medicine bundle. The flap was open. The dog must have been sniffing at it. Thoughtlessly the Indian raised corn to his lips.

  Don’t eat, said the dog. Your spirit is waiting.