The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp REVIEW

This novel is, purportedly, mainly made up of Jack Sparks’s final book – Jack Sparks on the Supernatural, another in the long list of hot-button topics covered by the egotistical reporter (you likely don’t remember his previous works Jack Sparks on Gangs and Jack Sparks on Drugs). From laughing at a sombre Italian exorcism to getting blood-boilingly jealous of a fat nerdy ghosthunter, Jack can literally cover any topic you throw at him. But, as you can take away from the title, it seems that when he tackled the occult he bit off more than he could chew.

The parts of The Last Days of Jack Sparks that aren’t made up of Jack Sparks on the Supernatural are mainly second and third opinions – interviews with eyewitnesses, transcripts of recorded conversations, and, before anything else, an introduction-cum-disclaimer from Jack’s brother Alistair. He (fumblingly) illustrates the book’s background and the turmoil of their childhood, in particular one spooky incident that definitely had absolutely nothing to do with him.

Jack Sparks on the Supernatural itself is based on the well-worn premise of a skeptic (in this case Jack) taking a grand tour of the best the otherworldly has to offer and seeing if any of it’s halfway convincing. And to be fair, nobody involved is unaware that it’s well-trodden ground. We get a namedrop of James Randi’s famous bounty of a million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate proof of the supernatural (still unclaimed) and of Jack’s celebrity atheist fellow-travellers, Richard ‘Tricky Dick’ Dawkins and Ricky ‘Dicky Dick’ Gervais (he doesn’t actually know them, just follows them on twitter). So we’re on hallowed turf, here, although the people concerned might not call it that.

Things really start to hot up when after that exorcism – which he dismisses entirely as showmanship and special effects, even when the priest is hospitalised – Jack is startled to discover that forces unknown have uploaded a particularly spooky video to his YouTube profile. Even more worryingly, with his fans and followers demanding to know more, it gets deleted only minutes later. So, even though he doesn’t find it at all convincing, now it’s personal.

At a few points throughout the book, Jack compares himself to Hunter S. Thompson – gonzo icon and go-to idol for journos or writers of any stripe who’re pretty sure that they’re right out on the cutting edge, man. And this, really, tells you all you need to know about the guy, in particular the fact that he’s clearly wrong. Between his devout atheism, smugly florid prose, and uptight still-living brother, he bears far better resemblance to Christopher Hitchens – or at least, a version of the Hitch who’s been belted round the head a few times.

Hitch was the very image of the asshole atheist, but at least engaged in serious analysis, and was willing to present the facts rather than just dismiss the bollocks. And, love him or hate him, Hitch was at least a serious cultural commentator, writing with passion and rhetorical skill on geopolitics as much as he ever did atheism (most controversially, on the Iraq war, which he supported unreservedly). By contrast, Jack is about as well-informed as the median reader, and that’s not good. Every time he takes the club of his own moral certainty to the kneecaps of the rest of world, he clearly thinks he’s being funny, when in fact he just comes off flippant. (To be fair, Hitch would have copped to that charge too).

Jack’s flaw, above all else, is that he’s bought into his own myth – and that is perhaps the book’s greatest achievement, that it presents us with a fully realised portrait of a writer with a myth. This is not a myth in the Brothers Grimm sense, but in the modern sense – Jack interacts with his fanbase, he tweets, he Youtubes, he reads what other people have written about what he’s written. One of the funniest/most tragic moments in the book comes when he loftily dismisses a website’s criticism of him – a passage immediately followed by a note to his editor to get their lawyers on the phone and wheel out the libel suits.

This tension between what Jack reports and what’s actually happened runs through most of the book – we have, for instance, him smarmingly reporting charming a drink out of ‘the cute Irish stewardess’ before takeoff, only to then have the stewardess’s take on it all, in which she describes how confronted by a drunken boor she gave him a glass of tonic with a drop of gin on the rim, and how he then had a massive freakout. Come the end, though, Jack eventually starts being our only coherent viewpoint – especially in regards to his childhood, with that account seeming all the more plausible because of Alistair’s furious denials in the footnotes.

Jack’s slide into being a more accurate voice comes in drips and drabs throughout the book, with the most obvious turn being his eventual admission that he didn’t actually kick everything after writing (and being) Jack Sparks on Drugs. It doesn’t come as a massive surprise, given some of the other accounts beforehand – including one poor Mexican ghosthunter who Jack, while falling-down drunk, desperately tries to buy cocaine from. More than anything, it just simultaneously slots into and explains the long tail of his obvious character flaws.

Speaking of which, everything about his relationship with his flatmate Bex. It begins with traces of affection – his obvious crush, her claiming not to read his books but actually secretly she does – which are wiped away when we start to hear about how he’s chosen to depict her as a frequently naked redhead who works as a fitness instructor, none of which is even close to true. Hers is a frequent voice in the independent accounts, but it’s when she chooses to go out to LA to join him in his search for the supernatural and he gets possessive that things rapidly spiral into the horrifying.

Between the elements of surface horror and the character study they underlie I’ve wanted to draw a comparison to Mary Shelley’s legendary Frankenstein – and I think the reason why is that Jack is, on some level, constructed by outside forces. Specifically the forces of fame and all that it entails and demands. Unlike the Monster, Jack is no innocent raging against his creator, but nonetheless is warped and malformed into what he is by a nebulous presence you might almost call a higher power – and the cruel joke of it is, that leads him to focus relentlessly on himself. Whether you’re into that sort of thrills and chills, or the more conventional horror kind, check this book out.

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