The Spirit

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 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.