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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

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.

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.”