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.