Tag Archives: Christopher Pike

Horror Book Review: Gimme a Kiss by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1988 book, Gimme a Kiss, deals with everyone’s worst nightmare.

Jane Retton’s diary has been stolen, photocopied, and passed around all of the students at her high school!  Everyone at the school is reading about how Jane lost her virginity to her committed boyfriend and how she totally loves him.  Everyone at the school declares that this makes Jane a total whore, even though the diary makes it clear that Jane has only had sex with her boyfriend and she only did that after she was sure that she was in love with him.

Here’s the thing, though.  The diary is a lie!  Jane is still a virgin and the only thing that she wrote in her diary was her fantasy about what she would like to do with her boyfriend!  And now, just because Jane has upset the school’s snooty cheerleaders, everyone thinks that she’s sexually active….

Wow, this book is really a product of the 1980s.

Anyway, Jane decides that the best way to handle all of this would be to fake her death so she decides to pretend to fall off of a boat and …. wait, what?  I’m not really sure that I see Jane’s logic here.  It didn’t make much sense when I read the book and, looking back on it, it still doesn’t make much sense.  Still, Jane decides to fake her death so that everyone will reconsider the way they treated her while she was alive.  (Because, certainly, it’s not like everyone’s going to be even more pissed off at her if they discover they were put through a peroid of mourning for nothing….)  But then someone starts coming after Jane and her classmates for real…. Could Jane’s true enemy be someone close to her?

This book was only 122-pages long.  It was a quick read, which is always a good thing.  The plot didn’t make a bit of sense and it felt like something that Christopher Pike just tossed on the page to make a deadline.  As opposed to other Christopher Pike books, the characters come across as being rather flat.  I will applaud the book for embracing the melodrama, especially in the scene where Jane learns the real reason why she’s being targeted.  But otherwise, this is lesser Pike.

Horror Novel Review: Weekend by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1986 novel, Weekend, involves the most memorable senior ditch day ever!

9 friends, who have a tangled web of personal relationships and conflicting feelings towards each other, head down to Mexico for the weekend.  They’ve got a mansion to stay in, one that belongs to the absent parents of their friend Robin.  Robin once had a great singing voice and a great future but, at the last party that her friends threw, someone spiked her drink with insecticide.  Now, Robin can barely speak and is only being kept alive by a dialysis machine.  The weekend in Mexico starts out as a fun but soon, secrets are being revealed, live are being put at risk, and who knows who will survive to the end!

The majority of the story is told through the eyes of Shani, who is a well-written and complicated character.  As opposed to the characters who populate the majority of R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books, Shani is nether perfect nor totally evil.  Instead, she’s someone who has very real emotions and, even more importantly, very real reactions to everything that’s going on around her.  (Christopher Pike’s novels have always felt a little less generic than R.L. Stine’s.  That said, Pike’s novels also have a tendency to be a bit more unnecessarily complicated than Stine’s.)   That said, the other characters are not as well-written as Shani and, with a total of 9 people staying at that mansion, it can get a bit difficult to keep straight of who is who.  Keep a notebook nearby so you can jot down who betrayed who at which pep rally because it’s not always easy to keep track of it all.

I always enjoy books about people stranded with a killer for the weekend and Weekend does a good job of keeping you guessing as to who is responsible for what.  The finale, in which everything is explained, is enjoyably over the top.  Pike, wisely, chooses to embrace the melodrama when it comes to wrapping everything up.

Weekend is an enjoyably over-the-top novel.  If nothing else, this book might make you appreciate your own occasionally overdramatic friends.  Because as dramatic as they may be, they’re nowhere near as bad as the folks in Weekend.

Horror Book Review: The Visitor by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

Book Review: Master of Murder by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This is a weird book from Christopher Pike.

First published in 1992, Master of Murder tells the story of Marvin.  Marvin is 18 and he seems like just your average high school student.  He’s still in love with his ex-girlfriend, Shelly.  He’s haunted by the mysterious death of Harry, who was Marvin’s best friend but who was also dating Shelly at the same time that Marvin was.  Marvin also takes care of his younger sister because, as was typical of YA books like this, their parents aren’t in the picture.  Obviously, if there were parents in these books, the adults would always want to call the police or solve the mysteries themselves.  Pike’s response was usually to either kill them, divorce them, or turn them into drunks.

Anyway, back to Marvin.  In the year since Harry’s death, Marvin has been leading a secret life.  He writes YA novels!  In fact, they’re the most successful YA novels ever!  He’s published five of them, all about a dead girl named Ann.  (Wait a minute …. that’s also his sister’s name!  Ewwww and Agck!)  From what I know about the publishing industry, none of this seems plausible but we’ll just go with it.  I mean, of course, Marvin is a high school senior who secretly writes best sellers and who regularly gets explicit fan mail from his teenage readers.  That makes purrrr-fect sense, as my cat would put it.

Anyway, Shelly asks Marvin to help her figure out who was responsible for death of Harry.  She might even date him again if he helps her out!  Plus, Marvin is getting mysterious letters from someone who writes, “I know who you are!”  Could the two events be connected?  Of course, they are!  And yes, Shelly has a secret of her own.

There’s no supernatural or intergalactic monsters in this Christopher Pike novel.  Instead, it’s a straight-forward murder mystery.  To be honest, when compared to other Pike books, it’s kind of bland.  The most interesting way to read it is as a sort of wish fulfilment for Pike.  One gets the feeling that, at the time that he wrote this book, he wished he was Marvin, a teenager who gets to live like he’s Christopher Pike.  As I said, it’s a weird book, one that makes it look as if the only thing simpler than solving a murder is writing a best seller when you’re 18.  If only it were true, there would be a lot more bestsellers and a lot more prison overcrowding.  Oh well!

Horror Novel Review: Witch by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1990, Christopher Pike’s extremely weird YA novel Witch tells the story of Julia Florence and her friend Amy.

Basically, Julia is the latest in a long line of witches.  She has the power to see the future and to heal people, with the only problem being that, when she heals them, she takes their illnesses and injuries into her own body.  So, if she heals someone who is on the verge of death, that means that she’ll be the one who dies.  That’s what happened to Julia’s mother and Julia’s determined not to let the same thing happen to her.  It seems like the simple solution would be to just not heal anyone.

But then her friend Scott gets shot during a convenience store robbery.  Scott is in a coma and is going to die unless he gets some supernatural healing.  Julia can either heal him or she can buy a gun (?), use her abilities to see the future, and go all vigilante in an attempt to take out the robber who shot Scott.  Julia goes for the latter but then Amy discovers that the robber has a weird, kind of out-of-nowhere connection to a girl who was previously healed by Julia’s mother.  And, she also discovers that there’s a coven of witches searching for Julia because …. well, who knows?

Anyway, it all comes down to whether or not Julia will risk her life to save Scott.  Scott is an aspiring director and kind of an annoying guy, to be honest.  But everyone is charmed by how annoying he is and he has a great future ahead of him, unless he dies.

Whatever will Julia do!?

This is a weird one.  Between the witchcraft, the healing, the psychic visions, the high school drama, and the vigilante action scenes, one gets the feeling that Pike just threw random darts at a bunch of story points that he had taped to the wall and he pretty much just went wherever the darts led him.  And don’t get me wrong.  It is a little fun to see just how many different genres and plot elements that Pike could stuff into one book but the story itself is still a bit of a mess.  There’s a lot in here and not all of it really comes together.

Plus, this is yet another Pike novel to end on a downbeat note.  R.L. Stine wrote some pretty morbid books but he always ended with a joke.  Pike’s books, on the other hand, always seem to end with the message that there is no such thing as a completely happy ending.  Normally, I’m all for a book that ends on a down note but this time, after all the messiness that came before the ending, I really could have used a Stine-style one liner.  Sometimes, the best way to deal with an existential crisis is to laugh your way through it.

Horror Novel Review: The Lost Mind by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1995, this is an odd one.

The book opens with our main character waking up in middle of the wilderness. She has no idea who she is or where she is. She doesn’t know why she’s covered in blood. What she does know is that there’s another girl lying a few feet away from her and she’s been stabbed to death! Did the living girl kill the other girl? She knows that she didn’t but, at the same time, she also knows that everyone will assume that she did.

It’s only after our main character stumbles across her car that she discovers that her name is Jenny. It’s only when she drives to a nearby town that she discovers that she lives with her overworked mom and her little brother. Apparently she goes to school and she has a job but Jenny can’t remember the specifics of any of it. Also, Jenny has a best friend named Crystal and they’re so extremely close that people are shocked whenever they see that Jenny is by herself. In fact, no one has seen Crystal for a while. Where could she be …. uh-oh.

Now, if this was an R.L. Stine novel, this is where you would expect some sort of cutesy twist to kick in. This is where you would look up from the book and says, “Ah-ha! I bet Jenny actually is Crystal and Jenny is just some imaginary character that she created to help her deal with a past trauma!” However, this is not an R.L. Stine novel. This is a Christopher Pike novel and Christopher Pike was always a hundred times darker than R.L. Stine ever was. If Stine always ended his books with a return to normalcy and maybe a joke or two, Pike’s novels took his characters to Hell and usually abandoned them there.

Even as she tries to figure out what type of life she’s led up until losing her memory, Jenny finds herself having dreams and visions where she’s in another person’s body, watching as they smoke hash, commit murders, and perform occult ceremonies. Soon, Jenny is investigating just what exactly it means to have a soul and whether or not a soul can move from one body to another. And, as she discovers more about the circumstances of Crystal’s death, she’s forced to consider just how far she’ll go to get revenge….

AGCK! Seriously, this is pretty dark stuff for a YA novel. I would have had nightmares if I had read this when I was a child. But that’s the thing with Christopher Pike. When he told a horrific story, he didn’t hold back. Instead, he created a world where happy endings often did not exist. The Lost Mind is dark and morbid and, even reading it now as an snarky and sarcastic adult, the book’s mystery was still intriguing. The book started out with a murder and it ended with a bang. Someone needs to turn this one into a Lifetime film.

Horror Novel Review: The Hollow Skull by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Reading a Christopher Pike book after spending a few days focused on R.L. Stine can be a jarring experience.

Even though Stine and Pike are often compared to each other, Pike’s books are usually a lot darker than Stine’s.  Whereas an R.L. Stine boo will, more often than not, end with the promise of a return to normalcy, Pike’s novels often seem to end on a down note.  The teenage heroes of Pike’s books are just as likely to fail as they are to succeed.  Whereas Stine usually only offers up one or two deaths over the course of his books, Pike has no fear of wiping nearly the entire cast by the final chapter.  The world of Christopher Pike is a dark disturbing place.

Consider 1998’s The Hollow Skull.  The Hollow Skull takes place in the small desert town of Madison, Nevada.  Cassie has just graduated high school and is desperate to get out of the town.  After all, California’s not that fear away.  Why couldn’t Cassie move out there and maybe go to college at UCLA?  The only problem is that all of her friends seem to be content with the idea of staying in Madison, including her boyfriend.  Plus, if Cassie leaves, that’ll mean leaving her little sister with their abusive, alcoholic father.

Still, because Cassie is determined to escape, her friends suggest that they all go on one last adventure.  Hey, why not go down the abandoned mine shaft!?  Of course, it turns out that there’s a weird pool of black goo at the bottom of the mine shaft and, after one Cassie’s friends falls in the goo, he starts to act strangely.

In fact, the entire town of Madison starts to act differently, as if they’ve been possessed and disturbing thoughts are now being put into their skulls.  Suddenly, everyone that Cassie knows is acting differently.  Cassie decides that it time for her and her sister to flee Madison but it turns out that escaping is not going to be as easy as going down an abandoned mine shaft….

Seriously, abandon all hope ye who enter here!  This is a dark, dark book. It owes more than a little debt to Invasion of the Body Snatchers but, even more than being a traditional YA horror novel, it’s also a look at just how difficult it is to start a new life.  No matter how hard she tries, Cassie cannot seem to make a clean break from Madison.  Even if she’s not possessed like everyone else in town, she’s still trapped.  At its best, the book captures the hopelessness of being trapped in one location or situation and feeling like you’ll never be able to figure out how to move forward.  

Of course, plotwise, it’s all a bit predictable.  If you’ve seen any of the versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you’ll be able to guess what’s going to happen.  For that matter, if you’ve read Christopher Pike’s Monster, you’ll also be able to predict much of what awaits Cassie.  Still, if you’re weary of R.L. Stine’s positivity, Christopher Pike provides a rather downbeat antidote.  

Book Review: Execution of Innocence by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

*sigh*

I was super excited when I came across a copy of the 1997 Christopher Pike novel, Execution of Innocence, in my collection of used paperbacks. Along with R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike was one of the kings of YA horror and suspense literature in the 1990s. In fact, his books were often a bit more macabre than even Stine’s. If Stine killed off four people in a book, Pike would probably kill off 8. I was looking forward to reading Execution of Innocence. Just the title alone promised all sorts of morbid drama! Unfortunately, the book itself doesn’t really live up to the promise of that title.

The book opens with Mary, a teenage girl, sitting in a police department. It turns out that one of her classmates, the wealthy Dick (and that does turn out to be an appropriate name) is dead. The cops thinks that Mary’s boyfriend, Charlie, murdered Dick because he got jealous over Mary and Dick going to the school dance. Charlie, it turns out, is a mechanic from the bad side of town. Mary’s a good girl and Charlie’s a bad boy, and Dick’s dead. And now, Charlie has mysteriously disappeared.

The problem is that Mary swears that she doesn’t remember what happened the night that Dick died. The cops are skeptical, especially when another witness comes forward and declares that Mary threatened to kill Dick herself! Now, Mary has to work with her friend Hannah and prove that she didn’t murder Dick. But what Mary doesn’t realize is that Hannah has secrets of her own….

This is one of those books where describing makes it sound more than it actually is. The mystery of who murdered Dick has the potential to be intriguing but Pike, instead, continually has his characters act in the most illogical and improbable of ways. The reader spends a good deal of the book trying to understand everyone’s possible motives just to discover that the actual motives either don’t make sense in the first place or, in the case of one major character, they feel a bit homophobic. It also doesn’t help that the book attempts to present Charlie and Mary as being some sort of ideal couple when they’re relationship is actually about as toxic as they come. You really can’t help but feel that all of Mary’s friends (and the cops) had a point when they warned her away from the guy.

Execution of Innocence is definitely not first-rate Pike. Try re-reading Monster instead. That’ll give you nightmares!

Horror Book Review: Road to Nowhere by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

To be honest, I ordered a copy of this 1993 YA novel from Half-Price Books strictly because of the cover.  I mean, there were several old Christopher Pike books to chose from but that image of the young woman driving her car with the skeleton sitting beside her just leaped out at me.  I think a lot of it had to do with the fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror.  I’ve got a St. Patrick medal hanging from my mirror but if I wasn’t half-Irish and if I hadn’t been raised Catholic, I definitely would have the dice….

Well, actually, I probably wouldn’t have anything hanging from my mirror.  Seriously, those big dice look like they’re going to get in the way.  I mean, she’s already driving in the rain and she’s got a skeleton sitting next to her.  Does she need the distraction of giant dice?  No wonder death is coming along the ride….

Anyway, the book itself is about an 18 year-old named Teresa.  Teresa is an aspiring songwriter and singer.  She just broke up with her boyfriend Bill.  The book takes place on the night that she was planning to lose her virginity to Bill but now that she’s single and miserable, she figures that she might as well just drive to the Bay area.  Teresa also decides to pick up two hitchhikers because apparently, she’s never read a scary book or seen a horror movie before.

The hitchhikers are named — look, I’m not joking — Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn.  Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn are also heading to the Bay and they have all sorts of interesting stories to tell about yet another couple, John and Candy.  Now, to be honest, I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers in the first place.  I don’t care how lonely I am.  I don’t care how much its raining.  I don’t care how late at night it is.  I’m not picking you if you’re standing on the side of the road.  But even if I did pick up a pair of hitchhikers, I would probably kick them out of the car as soon as they started telling me a story about a doomed couple who are obviously the hitchhikers in a past life.  Somehow, Teresa doesn’t immediately catch onto the fact that Freedom Jack and Poppy Fresh are actually John and Candy despite the fact that it’s incredibly obvious.  (John = Jack.  Candy = Poppy Corn.  I mean, come on….)  Then again, Teresa doesn’t seem to be the smart in general.

Anyway, Teresa’s journey with the two hitchhikers leads to her stopping off at both a castle and a church and losing her virginity.  The journey continues without anywhere seeming to get anywhere because they’re on a road to nowhere and this is one of those Christopher Pike books where nothing is what it actually seems to be.  There’s a lot of twists but they’re all somewhat predictable twists.  If you’ve read any of Christopher Pike’s other books, you’ll be able to guess what’s going on in The Road to Nowhere.  In the end, everyone has come to peace with their past and chosen their future.  While the stories of Teresa and Bill and John and Candy contain moments of deep darkness, Road to Nowhere , especially when compared to Pike books like The Immortal and Die Softly, is actually rather optimistic about the ability of people to move on and find some sort of peace.

Finally, let’s give the book some credit for coming up with names like Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn.  That, in itself, is an accomplishment worth celebrating.  Still, I wish the cover had more accurately reflected the content of the book.

Book Review: The Immortal by Christopher Pike

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

This 1993 novel tells the story of two friends on a Greek vacation.

Now, when I say “friends,” what I mean is that we’re told that they’re friends and they spend a lot of time hanging out with each other and the entire book is pretty much about the developments in their relationship.  However, for two lifelong friends, they really don’t seem to like each other that much.  I mean, when I was in high school, I had friends who I secretly disliked but I never went to Greece with them.

Our friends are named Helen and Josie.  Josie has a rich father, who is a screenwriter and who is accompanying the girls to Greece.  Helen has a less rich father because this is a Christopher Pike book and someone always has to come from a poor but honest family.  Both Helen and Josie are recovering from near-death experiences.  Helen attempted to commit suicide.  Josie had a heart problem of some sort.  You would think that, having come close to dying, Helen and Josie would be all about celebrating life but actually, they’re still fighting over Ralph.  Ralph used to date Helen and then he dated Josie and then he left town.

One thing that I quickly discovered while reading this book is that it’s not always easy to remember what happened to Helen and what happened to Josie.  Even while I was reading it, I kept mixing up who had which tragic backstory.  I probably should have kept better notes but, honestly, when you’re reading a 200-page YA novel from the early 90s, your first thought is not going to be, “I better go grab my notebook because these 200 pages might be too complicated for me to keep track of.”

Anyway, Josie hooks up with Tom, who is British and sensitive and who refuses to have sex on a nude beach without a condom.  Helen kind of hooks up with Pascal, who doesn’t speak English.  Josie steals an ancient artifact.  Helen serves Josie a hamburger that’s full of ground-up glass. There’s a big storm that overturns a boat and …. wait a minute, what?  Ground up glass in a hamburger!?  AGCK!

Anyway, it’s all because Helen and Josie were apparently possessed by two angry Greek goddesses during their last visit to Greece.  Apparently, these angry Greek spirits have been trying to kill each other for centuries or something like that.  I couldn’t really follow it and, to be honest, I think Christopher Pike just made it up as he was going along.

That said, I kind of enjoyed the book, just because of how silly it all was.  I mean, Helen and Josie seriously are the worst friends ever.  The book may not make sense but between all of the strange dreams, the deadly hamburgers, and all the passive aggressive insults, it was never boring.  If nothing else, it made me think about the vacation that I took the summer after I graduated from high school.  My sisters and I traveled all over Europe and we saw all sorts of ancient ruins and we managed to do it without stealing any artifacts or trying to kill each other.  I’m proud of what we accomplished!