The Cutprice Guignol

Please note that this article contains discussion of suicide, drug use, sexual abuse, and animal abuse.

In 1971, two things happened: a book was released, and a young man took his life. Though they initially seemed to bear no connection to each other, the book’s author and the young man’s story would come together to form the basis for a scandalous book – and a hoax that would serve as the opening salvo of the Satanic Panic in America.

The book was Go Ask Alice – penned by an anonymous author, it hit the shelves in mid-1971. Claiming to chronicle, via real-life diaries, the downfall of a young American teenage girl after a descent into drug addiction and sex trafficking, Go Ask Alice was a wild and unprecedented success almost immediately.

Go Ask Alice banked on a number of alluring and scandalous selling points. Told through the purportedly real diaries of an unnamed fifteen-year-old protagonist, it depicts the lurid spiral into drug-induced destruction she finds herself drawn into after drinking a cola laced with LSD at a party. She goes from smoking weed to shooting heroin in a matter of weeks, with the story reaching a disturbing climax in a violent scene of group sexual assault that the narrator describes in great detail. By the end of the book, she returns to her loving parents and swears off drugs – only to die a mere three weeks later of an overdose.

Any teenager will tell you that the most enticing books are the ones your parents don’t want you to read, and Go Ask Alice quickly fell under that banner. becoming one of the first young adult literary sensations in the process. It remains one of the most frequently-challenged books taught in schools, but parental disapproval wasn’t enough to keep young adults voraciously consuming this shocking tale that purported to be from one of their peers. After a movie version of the book (starring William Shatner) was released a few years later, librarians began keeping track of re-broadcasts so they could order in the additional twenty or so copies of the book that would be in hot demand in the following weeks.

Of course, it didn’t take long for scepticism to arise about the veracity of the diaries; the writing reads as almost parodic of what a hand-wringing adult might assume about teenagers taking drugs, and the finger-wagging overtones spoke more to an adult author than a teenage one.

Within a few years, Utah-based Mormon child counsellor Beatrice Sparks (fifty-four at the time of the book’s publication) had come forward to acknowledge her part in “editing” the diaries, though she continued to claim that they were vastly true – despite admitting to embellishments and additions to the story she had taken from other teenage clients she’d treated over the years. When asked to produce the diaries, she was unable to, and later copies of the book would include a preface that declared it a work of fiction.

The same year of Go Ask Alice’s release, across the state from Sparks’ home in Provo, Utah, sixteen-year-old Alden Niel Barrett committed suicide in his small Utah hometown of Pleasant Grove. Barrett, who was raised in the Mormon church alongside two siblings, had suffered from depression prior to his death, and left behind a diary that chronicled the last few months of his short, troubled life. The tiny town that had been his home was rocked by the suicide, rumours flying about the nature of his death and what had led to it

A couple of years after his death, Barrett’s mother, Marcella Barrett, read an article in a local newspaper about Beatrice Sparks and her involvement in the release of the Go Ask Alice diaries. Barrett, intrigued by the premise of the book as a cautionary tale for teenagers, saw an opportunity to preserve her son’s memory and hopefully guide other teenagers from the same fate. Reaching out to Sparks, Barrett offered her access to her son’s diaries for adaptation, which Sparks accepted.

Over the next few years, Sparks worked on what Barrett believed would be a lightly-edited version of her son’s diaries. Though they depicted a few aspects of Alden’s life that his mother was concerned about making public – such as his anti-Vietnam-War sentiments, questioning of the LDS church, and interest in Eastern religion – she felt that the importance of helping other teenagers from suffering the same fate as Alden outweighed her worries. Barrett and Sparks met just a couple of times before Barrett entrusted her with telling her son’s story, and Sparks promised that she would let the family read the manuscript before the book was released.

Sparks, in addition to the content of the diaries shared by Barrett’s mother, claimed to have interviewed various friends and other acquaintances of Alden to fill out the story of the book, and was listed as an editor when the book was finally released in 1978. Alden’s name had been changed to Jay, and the book boasted a shocking title and Sparks signature claim of gritty veracity: Jay’s Journal: The shocking diary of a 16-year-old helplessly drawn into a world of witchcraft and evil.

The book itself, similar to Go Ask Alice in both its hand-wringing, finger-wagging tone and writing style (despite the fact they were meant to be written by different authors), is almost laughably outrageous in its approach – or it would be, if it wasn’t for the real-life child suicide behind it. A bizarre and unbelievable mix of Mormon piety and extended scenes of juicy devil worship to draw in a scandalized audience, it’s hard not to see Sparks’ own religious beliefs and other biases at play here. I was also struck by how much the book had in common with Mike Warnke’s book The Satan Seller, another purportedly-true story about a young satanist who turned to evangelical Christianity that was later proved to be false, which became very popular in Christian circles around the time Sparks created Jay’s Journal.

 In the book, Jay goes from the fundamentally good, innocent son of a devout Mormon family to a devil-worshipper drawn in to a surprisingly well-organized and prominent cult in the small town of Pleasant Grove, along with several friends and his girlfriend, Tina (Sparks changed the names of these characters, though claims that their depictions are otherwise accurate). Soon, they commit a long list of standard-issue sensationalized acts of satanism and devil-worship, from animal slaughter and blood-drinking to violent sex and, eventually, a dramatic baptism in blood where the young teenagers dedicate their lives to “our father, which art in Hell”.

The group get involved in witchcraft, levitating cutlery around a local diner and using a crystal ball to expand their knowledge of their new powers. When Jay loses out on a role in a high school production and the boy who won it over him falls ill, he begins to suspect Tina of exploding his appendix via witchcraft. Jay, the son of a pharmacy tech, begins stealing drugs from his father’s workplace, replacing them with powdered milk so he and his friends can use the stolen substances to get high. Two of Jay’s friends die in vehicle accidents after their cars are apparently possessed by a demonic presence, both impaled through the right temple.

Taking place over the course of eighteen months, the book climaxes as Jay tries to turn back to Mormonism, realizing his mistake and vowing to re-dedicate his life to the LDS church, before he comes to believe that he is possessed by a spirit named Raul. The book ends as Alden’s life did: with a suicide.

But, according to the family and community around Alden, the book is almost entirely invented. Alden’s brother Scott claimed that Sparks used a mere twenty-one entries from Alden’s diary of the more than two hundred Marcella shared, and the additional content was either fabricated or wildly exaggerated versions of true stories told to Sparks by the people close to Alden.

For example, the book depicts a devilish pseudo-wedding ceremony, where Alden and Tina spit blood into each other’s mouths in the dead of night in the Pleasant Grove graveyard before snapping a kitten’s neck to dedicate themselves to each other in “eternal slavery”. Alden’s real-life girlfriend, conversely, describes a sweet, teenage commitment ceremony where the two kids held hands and kissed on a prayer mat in front of a statue of Jesus at the cemetery she had found comforting as a child. Alden did lose two friends in car accidents, but the details did not match those depicted in Jay’s Journal. He was caught with illegal drugs – but they weren’t stolen from his father, his stash instead made up of a small amount of weed.

Like Go Ask Alice, Jay’s Journal was an immediate hit: appealing to an increasingly-prominent fear in the American public psyche about occultism and satanic rituals, the salacious story with a suitably tragic ending sold copies within the first year of its release. The author was simply listed as “anonymous”, and, once again, it wouldn’t surprise me if the spectre of slandering or even questioning a dead teen author led some to be more accepting of the book’s veracity and content than they might have been otherwise. To me, it seems quite clear that the book is at the very least heavily edited by the same person behind Go Ask Alice; the writing style and overall tone are incredibly similar, considering that these are meant to be two diaries by two separate teenagers going through very different things in completely disparate circumstances. On writing, or, rather, editing the book, Sparks said she would avoid writing it at night, fearful of the dark Satanic forces that affected Jay entering her own life.

Alden’s surviving family were gobsmacked and devastated by the content of the book. Sparks, despite her promises, did not let them read the book before it was released, with Marcella coming to know about the story when a local friend remarked on the book’s scandalous story. Despite the pseudonym, it soon became well-known in Pleasant Grove that Jay’s Journal was, in fact, based on Alden’s diaries, though far fewer realized the liberties that Sparks had taken with the content.

Aside from a couple of dalliances with a Ouija board – far from an unusual occurrence for a kid raised in a Mormon family looking to rebel – nothing in Alden’s diaries even hinted at an interest in, let alone a criminal involvement, with devil-worship. The crimes that Sparks included in the book, such as animal abuse, theft, and drug misuse, were not substantiated by reports at the time, and I was unable to find anything that corroborated them. Captain Cody Cullimore, who worked for the Pleasant Grove police department for more than two decades, remarked to Salt Lake Weekly in 2004 expressed his belief that the book was sensationalized, based on the virtual absence of encounters with the occult in the area during his tenure on the force (the few cases he did encounter coming as a result of copycats based on Jay’s Journal).

As with Go Ask Alice, the book became a huge hit, another bestseller. Serving as Sparks’ second release in the young adult genre, it led to Sparks receiving, by her own recollection, many letters from teenagers thanking her for the warning she had provided in Jay’s Journal to stay away from the occult and avoid the same fate as Jay and his friends. The book, according to Sparks, had served its purported purpose: to keep teens away from the very real threat of being pulled into a Satanic cult if they just weren’t devout enough.

As for Alden’s family, they were left with the heavy brand of Alden’s alleged involvement with the satanic. The town, which had been founded by Brigham Young (also the founder of the Mormon church), was a profoundly Christian one, with a tablet depicting the Ten Commandments displayed as a prominent centrepiece to the town. The Barrett family claimed the backlash against them for their son’s involvement with the occult caused huge problems in their life – from defacement of Alden’s grave to dead animals being left in Marcella’s letterbox. Alden’s younger brother, Scott, carried the weight of this through high school, and, more than fifteen years after Sparks released Jay’s Journal, he decided to pen his own version of his brother’s life.

Combining transcriptions from Alden’s diary with interviews with surviving friends from the time of Alden’s death, Scott set out to produce a more accurate version of Alden in literary form. In the late 1990s, he released A Place in the Sun: The Truth Behind Jay’s Journal. This book depicts Alden as a sensitive young man troubled by what he sees as the injustices of the world around him, especially those committed by the LDS church: “I live in a world of filthy air and water, war, Mormonism (and other assorted bullshit), [It’s difficult] trying to be liberal in an ultraconservative atmosphere.” He wrote of his girlfriend in some poetry included in the book as offering “ touches and glances that vibrate the sky, and puts us together on a natural high.”

And speaking of highs, Alden does mention drug use – weed, specifically – in his diaries, but was avoiding drugs at the time of his death. The journals run from August 1970 to January 1971, two months before Alden’s suicide, not the eighteen-month period depicted by Jay’s Journal. The differences between Alden and Jay’s stories are enormous, and it’s nearly impossible to believe that Alden would not have mentioned anything of the occult worship Sparks claimed in Jay’s Journal made up such a significant part of his life and death.

Sparks was aware of Scott’s book – in fact, she implied that he contacted her in a borderline-threatening fashion (which Scott denies), asking for help in publishing his version of Alden’s story. She sent the family a check for $75, which served as the family’s last contact with Sparks.

Sparks, however, continued to comment on Jay’s Journal until her death in 2012. She walked back the claims that the book was entirely accurate, later describing it as “semi-true”, and eventually expressed regret for writing and releasing the book, declaring it the only story she wished she hadn’t published. Despite this, however, the book remained in print, one of her most iconic works in a career of “scared-straight” style sordid teen stories, that spanned topics from anorexia and teen pregnancy, to AIDs and drug abuse.

But Jay’s Journal had an impact that spanned far beyond the confines of Pleasant Grove, and even Sparks’ Publishers and the reading public alike were interested in stories of this kind of satanic cultism infiltrating small, seemingly innocent towns in America, and Jay’s Journal and its bestseller status proved the financial worth to releasing such a book – fact or fiction. The success of the book and, specifically, the fascination with the apparent cult rituals depicted within, arguably served to lay the groundwork for one of the most infamous books of the century.

Two years after the release of Jay’s Journal, Lawrence Padzer – who, similarly to Sparks, worked with children in a therapeutic setting – released the book Michelle Remembers. The book, which covers the supposed life story of Padzer’s then-client and later-wife Michelle Smith, purported to tell the story of Smith’s violent childhood abuse at the hands of a Satanic cult. Much like Jay’s Journal, it depicted blood sacrifice, people smearing themselves in blood and other bodily fluids, unusual or violent sexual activity and abuse, with many of the crucial rituals taking place in a cemetery.

And, much like Jay’s Journal, it has since been determined to  virtually entirely unsubstantiated. The book remained in circulation for many years after the apparent debunking of the shocking events depicted, and is often credited for kicking off the Satanic Panic trend that consumed much of the American public consciousness throughout the following decade and beyond. More than 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of ritual abuse committed by satanists were reported in the following decades, including dozens of wrongful imprisonments of those accused of this abuse. Jay’s Journal is often cited as one of the earliest examples of the non-existent plague tearing through America, a cautionary tale with just enough shocking, horrible elaborations to make it interesting and land it in the bestseller list – no matter what it did to the memory a young man lost to suicide, or the family that survived him.

As of 2024, Beatrice Sparks is listed as the sole author for all but two of her works – indicating that, in an official capacity, they’re recognized as hoaxes created solely by Sparks, instead of the diary adaptations and anonymous teen confessions she originally claimed them to be. Jay’s Journal, for me, is the most egregious of these hoaxes, because of the very real person she dragged in to an outrageously offensive and unsubstantiated story to capitalize on the beginnings of a burgeoning and hugely damaging cultural panic.

As for Alden Barrett, he’s buried in a plot in Pleasant Grove cemetery next to his father. His gravestone – regularly vandalized and even once stolen, according to the family, after the book was released – is inscribed with one of his poems, Portrait of a Child, which he wrote for his mother. It reads, in part, “Who’s eyes are these? As free as you please/A closeup of a child playing, searching/Who’s thoughts are those?” – one of the many pieces of Alden’s writing and his true self that Sparks so completely demolished in her book. Reading Jay’s Journal, it’s impossible not to reflect on Alden’s words – who’s thoughts are those? Who’s eyes are we seeing this story through? It’s certainly not Alden’s eyes, according to the people closest to him.

What about Sparks? I think that’s the most likely answer. When I finished the book myself – truly not something I would recommend, given the insultingly sensationalist nature of the story and the staggeringly low quality of the writing – it struck me that this story was one seen through the lens of the beginning of a moral panic, an opportunistic invention of a deeply sad story that fitted it into broader narratives of cultural outrage.

Reading the pieces of his diary that have been released via his brother’s book, I was struck by how much of myself I saw in Alden: a depressed kid living in a small town, having a hard time seeing a life beyond the confines of what he had been raised with. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels some connection to that kind of adolescent, and I think that’s why I found this book such a galling read beyond the nature of the content and the quality – for all Sparks claimed to be creating work that helped teenagers, she instead produced a piece that served to further alienate teenagers like Alden from the communities around them, turning his very normal questions about the world and experiments with drugs, love, and art into something dangerous, violent, and harmful.

Fundamentally, I believe that Alden Niel Barrett was a troubled young man whose diaries appear to show a compassionate outlook on the world at large, which he often found at odds with his upbringing and other aspects of his life, and I sincerely hope that will, eventually, become his legacy, instead of the fiction Sparks attached to his name.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide and self-harm, please know that you’re not alone. Here is a list of international suicide hotlines and counselling intended to help people dealing with suicidality – please consider checking it out if you can, and know that there is a life on the other side of this.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, you can support me on Patreon to help keep this blog running and keep my very demanding little cat in treaties, and me out of her clutches for another month yet, or consider checking out my fiction work!

(header image via Wikipedia)

*