The 1995 Christopher Pike novel, The Visitor, is a strange one, even by the very strange standards of Christopher Pike.

Mary is a high school student who has taken up smoking and general cynicism in response to the tragic death of her boyfriend Jerry.  Jerry was shot and killed by a school security guard who, it is believed, then shot himself out of guilt for having accidentally killed Jerry.  The truth of the matter is that the security guard came across Mary and Jerry while they were breaking into the school so that they could count the votes for homecoming queen to see whether or not Mary won.  (And, of course, Mary totally won.)  A struggle with the guard led to the guard shooting Jerry and then Mary shooting the guard!  No wonder Mary is struggling with guilt and now spends her time lying, half-undressed, on Jerry’s grave.

An attempt to contact Jerry via a séance goes terribly wrong after a spirit says that Mary has “lived before” and that she used to claim to have God-like powers.  Things get even stranger when Mary meets Tom, the new kid at school who has white-blonde hair and who has secrets of his own, all linking back to Mary’s past.  What are those secrets?  Well, let’s just say that it all links back to aliens and secret powers and there’s some “ancient astronauts as Gods” silliness and eventually, Jerry is brought back to life but he’s kind of whiny and leaking embalming fluid all over the place and Mary has to make a decision about how to deal with all of these weird complications.  But it also turns out that there’s more to Mary’s situation than even Mary originally realized and the entire book ends with a mind-screw that leaves you wondering who killed who and who might be an alien and who might be human….

Seriously, this is one weird book!  There’s a tendency among some to file Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine together but Pike’s books were always a hundred times darker and more macabre than Stine’s.  Whereas Stine’s books usually involved good kids in bad situations, Christopher Pike specialized in writing about bad kids dealing with uniquely Hellish problems.  If Stine’s books usually only featured one or two murders and a lot of misunderstandings, Pike specialized in books in which entire communities were destroyed and people really had absolutely no control over their fates.  In The Visitor, no one escapes unscathed.

The world of Christopher Pike was a dark one and that’s certainly the case with The Visitor.  Does the book always make sense?  Not really.  With its combination of aliens and zombies and ghosts and mysterious white-haired teenagers, the plot plays out like a uniquely demented dream.  It makes for an entertaining read.  And, in the end, the book provides an important lesson.  There’s nothing wrong with waiting a day to find out how the homecoming election went.  Don’t break into the school to count the votes yourself.  Nothing good ever comes from that!