I graduated from Pleasant Grove High School exactly two decades after the initial publication of Jay’s Journal, at a time when the internet was still in its infancy, fact checking was done in a library’s card catalogue, and the mythology surrounding Jay (real name Alden Barrett) had not abated. If anything, the cautionary tale of a local boy who falls in with the wrong crowd and begins practicing the occult were more than just rumors – they were taken in our community as gospel truth. Nearly everyone in Pleasant Grove knew someone who knew Barrett or had first-hand knowledge of the locations where he and his friends had practiced Satanic rituals. One persistent story was that Barrett had performed blood sacrifices and orgies in the basement of Pleasant Grove High School – a place I had been many times as a student to retrieve costumes and props for the drama department. Some claimed they had seen his ghost near his headstone in the local cemetery. Others said that he continued to haunt the house his family had lived in, the house where he had been possessed by a demon and eventually committed suicide.It’s difficult to overstate how deeply disturbing allegations of teens participating in Satanic worship still is in Utah unless you’ve grown up here (I still live about 20 minutes from Pleasant Grove High School). The local population is made up largely of conservative members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“LDS” or “Mormon” for short). As a naïve, impressionable young Mormon girl myself, just seeing Jay’s Journal sitting casually on the corner of a classmate’s desk made me fear that my own soul might somehow be imperiled. This fear was further reinforced by clergy and seminary teachers who repeatedly taught lessons on the evils of witchcraft and playing with Ouija boards. The only problem was, Alden Barrett had never actually participated in any of the occult practices purported in Jay’s Journal. The fantastical allegations of animal sacrifice and blood orgies were entirely the fictional imaginings of Go Ask Alice author and local Mormon housewife Beatrice Sparks.In Unmask Alice, author Rick Emerson does a fine job of deconstructing the mythology behind Jay’s Journal while giving spot-on insight into the Mormon zeitgeist of the 1970s. Emerson details the life of Barrett – a smart, sensitive boy who frustrated his parents with his sudden mercurial emotions (it is believed Barrett had undiagnosed clinical depression). As a teen, Barrett’s refusal to cut his long hair and his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War embarrassed his family who wanted him to conform to the conservative community they lived in. After Barrett’s tragic suicide at the age of 16, his mother, Marcella, offered Alden’s diary to Beatrice Sparks in the hope that it might be published and offer comfort to other teens and families in similar situations. It wasn’t until the diary was eventually published (without Barrett’s knowledge or consent) as the “nonfiction” title Jay’s Journal, that Marcella realized she had been duped by Sparks.Nearly fifty years on, Emerson’s scathing expose of Beatrice Sparks finally tells the true story behind one of literature’s biggest deceptions. Yet time and the truth will likely not keep Jay’s Journal from circulation on nonfiction shelves or whispered about in the halls of Pleasant Grove High School. In the Pleasant Grove Cemetery, the photograph on Alden Barrett’s headstone has been unrecognizably defaced by vandals – a testament to the lasting damage that Sparks continues to inflict on the Barrett family legacy. Unmask Alice is an important look at how one grieving mother’s desire to give purpose to her son’s tragic death was maliciously reframed, then passed off as truth - ultimately helping to fuel the “Satanic Panic” of the 1970s and weaponized against generations of impressionable youth.