Unmask Alice

Two teens, two diaries, two sordid scandals. All from the same dark place: a serial con artist who betrayed a grieving family, stole a dead boy’s identity, and swindled her way to the National Book Awards.

First published in 1971, Go Ask Alice shocked readers and reinvented the young adult genre. Fifty years and 5 million copies later, Go Ask Alice is more than famous—it’s iconic. Even people who haven’t read it know the basics: Some teenager’s diary…she’s hooked on drugs…it might be fake…doesn’t she die at the end?

But Alice was only the beginning.

In 1979, another “real” diary rattled the nation. The posthumous account of a boy lured into devil-worship, Jay’s Journal spurred the Satanic Panic—a literal witch hunt that lasted for decades, shattering lives and poisoning whole communities.

Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the Worlds Most Notorious Diaries is the true story of a young-adult blockbuster…of a terror that stalked 1980s America…and of the ruthless charlatan behind both.

Author and veteran radio/television broadcaster Rick Emerson spent five years unearthing and assembling this amazing and , nearly unbelievable story: interviewing central and peripheral players, visiting key locations, and sifting through tens of thousands of documents.

The story stretches from Hollywood to Quantico, and passes through a tiny patch of Utah desert called “the fraud capital of America". It’s the story of a doomed romance and an unhinged celebrity. Of a lazy press and a public mob. Of two suicidal teenagers, and their exploitation by a literary vampire. Unmask Alice is the gripping true story of a pop-culture smash—and its ugly, ongoing fallout.