The Spirit

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.