Jay's Book, by the anonymous aka Beatrice Sparks, PhD

[rachelmanija]

yhlee and I visited the YA section of Vroman's Bookshop in a quest for the ultimately awesomely angsty YA novel.

She proposed that single-syllable, single-word titles often predict great and melodramatic angst. For example, the oevre of Ellen Hopkins-- in verse-- Crank (meth addiction), Burned (child abuse), and Impulse (suicide). (I see that her upcoming book, Identical, is about "a father's twisted obsession for one of his twin daughters," no I am not kidding.) By other authors, Safe (mother is murdered, daughter is raped), Tweak (drug addiction), Cut (cutting), and Sold (child prostitution). The lone exceptions were Hoop, about basketball, and Prom, about the prom.

But then I found Jay's Book, by the same woman who wrote Go Ask Alice, purportedly the diary of a teenager who gets slipped LSD at a party, then becomes an addict and dies, and another one which was purportedly the diary of a teenager who gets AIDS from being raped. The latter has an appendix claiming that condoms are unreliable and "renegade sperm" can charge your vagina and get you pregnant even if there was no penetration.

Jay's Book is purportedly the diary of a boy who commits suicide after getting involved in the occult. The introduction warns, The voice of every kid hooked on drugs, alcohol, or the occult joins the sad chorus, "Not me! I didn't think it could happen to me. I WAS SURE I COULD HANDLE IT.

The back cover promised animal sacrifice and Ouijia Boards, and the contents did not disappoint. It was awesome. It had orgies, psychic powers, rape, channelling, tarot cards, LSD, homophobia, cutting (I think that was when I fell to the floor), wangas (occult objects from "Haiti, land of voodoo"), racism, chanting, and pot.

Other highlights included Bootan worship (I think that was Satan spelled with a B. And an O.) and the sacrifice in a graveyard of a "teeny mewing kitten" after a Bootanic wedding ceremony.

And then the real fun begins! Jay and his cult fiend Satanic druggie friends begin writing in white on black paper. They find a bull and electrocute it with a stun gun. Each organ was immediately sealed in a fruit jar. (Paging Drs. Muraki and Jezebel Disraeli.) They drink the blood and puke.

Then Satan comes after them, and two of them die in Mysterious Car Crashes, and Jay shoots himself in the head. The afterword says, apparently not sarcastically, We feel that Jay lived a pretty full life in his short 16 1/2 years. I'll say!

In conclusion, I leave you with this immortal line of Jay's, and no, it does not make any more sense in context:

The saber-toothed crotch crickets are leaving their abode.

I feel those words of wisdom embody a sentiment we all could live by.

Yoon reports my reaction to this gem of insanity. When she says I fell to the floor, she is not exaggerating for comic effect.

Comments

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Oh, God, Flowers in the Attic. People who complain about incest porn on the Internet should go read that and stfu.

Also: For her part, Sparks thinks the family is in denial about their wayward boy.

It takes balls the size of basketballs for that. Damn.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Man, we passed around a copy of Flowers in the Attic in was it fourth or fifth grade til it was _raggedy._ My mom wouldn't let me read it, so we'd go to the supermarket and I'd drift into the bookstands (like usual) and sneak five-ten pages at a time and get in trouble when she went through the checkout and came back and caught me goggling at the pages.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

My school library had it.

...yeah, I know.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

....WOW.

My junior high school library had....damn, what did it have? It was v slim pickins, as best I can recall....they had Giants in the Earth, for some reason. And Childhood's End. And the R.R. Knudson "Zan" books. And....I usually ignored it in favour of the Santa Fe Public Library.

I forget how many V.C. Andrews books I actually read -- I think I made it all the way through Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, maybe Garden of Shadows.... //checks Yup, the bibliography dates match up. SOMEHOW I never got into any of the endless Cinnamon/Rain/Honey/Thunder/Peaches/Double Fudge/Unchained Melody series.

Oh God and My Sweet Audrina, ohhh man. -- No wait, I'm mixing that up with Audrey Rose. //facepalm

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

They had The Spy Who Loved Me too! Which is pretty much all porn and then a little James Bond.

They were all kind of the same book, really.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

....wow, was this a Progressive school, as in The Silver Chair, or no....?

I managed not to read any Bond til about my late twenties, and then I picked up a handful of really cheap paperback editions at a favourite used bookstore for something like a buck apiece out of sheer curiosity. And I read about three of them before I just went "Uh, no." (Same thing wrt Mickey Spillane -- altho people told me I'd like him because I like Chandler and Hammett and Cain and &c &c.) I _was_ surprised to find Bond seemed a lot more dour and less wisecracking and more, uh, sadomasochistic than he was in the movies.

My father's brothers and cousins used to read endless Louis L'Amour Westerns, altho I think that genre is largely dead now (unless you count Larry McMurtry, and it's not quite the same thing). Those were all pretty much the same book, too.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

No, just...had a whole shelf of paperbacks that I think were either not considered at all or considered to be At Least They're Reading Something.

There's a guy at the Onion AV Club who's been reading through them and it's the first time I've thought about picking one up since high school.

My grandfather read so much Louis L'Amour. I liked Zane Grey better, though it was long enough ago I'm not sure exactly why. And yeah, McMurtry isn't quite the same!

[chickflick1979.livejournal.com]

Oh, boy. I read EVERY SINGLE V.C. Andrews book. We used to pass them around on the bus at summer camp.

The scary part is that when I was done reading them, I would pass them off to my mom. She loved them, too.