The Spirit

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.