Jay's Journal

Jay is a religious, depressed teenager in the mid-to-late 1970s. His Sunday School teachers persuade him to keep a journal, and he fills it with poems about conformity and complaints about his parents, who keep catching him in trouble.

His first girlfriend, Debbie, asks him for amphetamines from his father's pharmacy, where he works. Jay takes them and hides the loss by filling the emptied capsules with powdered milk. His father catches him and fires him. The pharmacy faces legal trouble, and Jay is sent to a juvenile detention center.

There he meets Pete, who introduces him to the occult. Back home he starts dating Tina, who uses witchcraft to sway school elections. Together with friends they form a coven. Its rituals grow violent, involving a kitten, cattle and blood.

Jay begins to see a demon he calls Raul and believes it is possessing him. The deaths of his two best friends in car accidents seem tied to the coven. The entries are bleak, and the book closes with a letter from his mother.

Published in 1979 as a diary, the book is credited to Beatrice Sparks as editor and writer. It draws partly on the life of Alden Barrett, a 16-year-old from Pleasant Grove, Utah, who died by suicide in 1971.