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 lifeform, 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.