Jack Sparks died while writing this book.
It
was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the
occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he'd already
triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed.
Then there was that video: forty seconds of chilling footage that Jack
repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet was posted from his own
YouTube account.
Nobody knew what happened to Jack in the days that followed—until now.
***
If Hunter S. Thompson had written a Blair Witch tie-in, it might have looked a little something like this. A gonzo ghost story that trades in unreliable narration and drug-fuelled devastation, The Last Days of Jack Sparks marks the original fiction debut of music journalist and now novelist Jason Arnopp, and has as its central character a man who made his name writing for the NME before properly letting loose in a few bestselling books.
That's where the similarities between the author and the authored end, however. I have reason to believe that Jason Arnopp is a genuinely decent human being, whereas Jack Sparks is an egotistical twit who, for his first trick, travelled the length and breadth of Great Britain on a pogo stick, offending everyone he encountered equally. Since then, he's gobbled up gang culture and gotten close to a couple of Class A chemical concoctions, with similarly repugnant results.
Now, for his new novel, he's set his sights on a Halloween theme. Could ghosts really be real? Our intrepid reporter wants to know. So much so that Jack Sparks on the Supernatural will be his last book, because he died, quite violently, while writing it.
We learn this thanks to Jack Sparks' estranged brother Alastair, who footnotes and provides a foreword for the first draft of the found fiction that follows:
The decision to publish Jack Sparks on the Supernatural in its entirely uncensored form was in no way taken lightly, and I know how very difficult it is for the bereaved to read accounts of such horrendous events. Yet I also hope this book may yield some form of closure and put an end to unhelpful internet speculation—not least concerning the nature of my brother's death. (p.8)Be warned, though, that Alastair's intentions might not be so wholly noble. "Believe me," he begs—but why should we? There's something defensive, dare I say desperate, about his abrupt introduction. And not long later, we learn that he and his brother weren't even on speaking terms towards the end of Jack's tenure. Might Alastair have an axe of his own to grind?
Jack indubitably does. He's a man on a mission at the outset of his ultimate effort: not to find evidence of things that go bump in the night, but to disprove every indication that they may. To wit, he sits in on an exorcism in Italy; laughs out loud as he live-tweets it, even. What he sees that day is hard to explain away, but Jack is determined to do so, or die trying.