Emerson, “Unmask Alice: LDS, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries” (Reviewed by Theric Jepson)

Review
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Title: Unmask Alice: LDS, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries
Author: Rick Emerson
Publisher: BenBella Books
Genre: Nonfiction/Investigative journalism
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 384
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781637740422
Price: $26.95

Reviewed by Theric Jepson

I had a wide variety of reactions to this book. Let’s see if I can get them to cohere into one thing in one draft. Ready, go.

The book is super-readable. Maybe an eighth-grade reading level in terms of vocab and syntax, with supershort chapters, often a bit cliffhangery. I zoomed through this book. It’s like potato chips.

I’ve never read Go Ask Alice or Jay’s Journal or any other of Beatrice Sparks‘s books. My primary memory of them is me age . . . eight? (so years after Jay had been released in 1978) at my aunt’s house, she and my mother having a whispered conversation about Jay’s Journal. I don’t remember details, but satanicpanicesque rumors swirled through the 80s and I knew Jay’s Journal was connected. (We also weren’t allowed to watch Dungeons & Dragons on Saturday morning. Though I snuck it in a few times anyway.) The book stayed at our house, while my mom was reading it, with a strict warning not to touch. Even today, when you enter my aunt’s house, the first thing you see is her bookshelves, and so that haunted hardback’s spine would look at me every time I entered.

Go Ask Alice I was less aware of, though I knew it was controversial. It never attracted my interest to actually read and I didn’t know the two books were connected by the same serial hoaxer. Or, if you prefer, the same liar. And I didn’t know she was LDS until just a few years ago. As was the nonSatanist kid she based Satanist Jay on.

In an early footnote on the word “Mormon,” Emerson says this:

Officially “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” a bulky phrase I don’t wish to type nine thousand times. In daily life—and despite the Church’s best efforts—it typically gets shortened to “LDS,” but given this book’s frequent mentions of “LSD” (the drug), that seems like asking for trouble and/or inadvertent hilarity. For clarity’s sake, I’m sticking to “Saints,” “Latter-day Saints,” “Mormon,” and other casual terms. No disrespect is intended.

No disrespect may be intended, but it’s hard not to be disrespectful when you have genuinely zero idea why anyone might be religious. The book’s vibe on religion can be summed up as “crazy-stupid shit we have to respect for some reason” and it shines through.

Now, look—midcentury LDS culture had plenty flaws I’ve no interest in defending, but when religion is defacto crazy-stupid to you, so are its adherents. Every Mormon in this book is, on some core level, a fool and possibly a dangerous fool. And details that emphasize that thus get more light shined on them than any that might mitigate.

Unmask Alice opens with an author’s note that essentially says—I am not exaggerating—don’t check but I have sources for everything and you can trust me.

I decided to go ahead and take him at his word but when I came to the second author’s note at the end of the book, I was shocked to see that his sources consist of 1) things you can check yourself so I didn’t put them in the book, 2) other things you can check yourself if you really want to, and 3) “Things that aren’t public and, for reasons of privacy, aren’t currently checkable.”

The last few chapters of the book consist of research that largely falls into #3, and he does say when he’s doing it as he’s doing it, which is a great way to build trust (suspiciously great, a cynic might say, being a tool Sparks also used). He says, for instance, that one of three librarians he’s talking to will not be named at her request as her brother also committed suicide (like “Jay”).

Emerson works to assure us he’s naming his sources whenever he can. But at one point he slams an HBLL program that works on Wikipedia articles by quoting an anonymous “BYU researcher.” He later gives a generous thank you to the HBLL in his final acknowledgments, but that anonymous BYU researcher remains anonymous. Why? Did his brother commit suicide too?

Even more startling to me was something thrown into the appendix. After three scans of Library of Congress records (to demonstrate how inconsistent they are describing Sparks’s work and how library records are, essentially, entirely whatever an author/publisher claims—he spent pages complaining about this system earlier in the book), he includes a scan from his own contract that “stipulates that fact-checking is my responsibility, and that I solemnly swear not to lie” (all captions were italicized)—which I found shocking because, given his trust-me form of sourcing, I was really counting on assurance that the publisher provided some New Yorker-level factchecking. They did not.

Look: The book largely rings true. But given my own knowledge about some aspects of what he talks about, I know he’s not playing totally straight, even if he thinks he is. Plus, he just takes so much (perhaps justifiable) delight talking about historical panics over LSD and marijuana and (nonexistent) Satanic cults. At one point, he blames his style on his experience in talk radio, and honestly that does feel explanatory. But no sources, no index—in the end, this does not feel like a work of scholarship. It’s a fun read and I believe it is mostly true, but the deeply disturbing irony of a book about someone who failed to source anything failing to source turns Unmask Alice into a work of popular entertainment. I would like to update several Wikipedia articles using his research, which seems good, but his assertion that his sources are out there should I too wish to search the Nixon tapes or Pleasant Grove High School yearbooks or the historical rosters of UCLA is weak. It’s just incredibly, embarrassingly weak.

It’s hard for me to understand why someone would do all this work and then get so lazy at the end. I suspect it’s because the publisher told him to do it himself. There’s a lesson here for authors and publishers alike. (Sadly, that lesson might be you can cut corners and sell the same amount of books, but I’d rather not consider that lesson.)

Finally, Rick Emerson is just kind of a jerk. And while he’s usually a good host, his willingness to take cheap shots now and then did not inspire my trust.