Born Kevin Christopher McFadden, Christopher Pike really, really, really wanted to be an author and so when his agent heard that there was a publisher looking for teen horror books, Pike wrote Slumber Party, the editor said it was too good for the line, he sent it to Jean Feiwel at Avon who asked him to remove the supernatural element, he did, then she left Avon and moved to Scholastic and brought Slumber Party. After publishing Slumber Party and Weekend and Chain Letter with Avon, Simon & Schuster showed up and told Pike he needed to come with them if he wanted to live. After that, the world entered PikeLand.
What is a Christopher Pike book? Basically they're books where kids wear clashing colors eat a lot of food, have a lot of sex, get drunk, murder each other, and never, ever stop playing charades.
It all started with Slumber Party (1985) originally designed to be a pyrokinetic Carrie knock-off, it got revamped into a “who burned who?” mystery in which six totally horrible teenage girls try to figure out who set one of them on fire in the past while also getting set on fire in the present. Lara (“This weekend ski trip would be one of the high points of her life.”), Dana (“sporting wide sunglasses designed to hide her big nose”), Celeste (“An envelope of sorrow enfolded her” because she's a sophomore who likes books), and Rachel (“I wish anorexia was contagious and I knew someone who could infect me”), converge on Nell's house for a ski trip with no parents (there are never any parents).
When they were ten years old, these little assholes got drunk (“Drunk is when you feel good and laugh a lot. We’re all going to get drunk right now") and played charades during which Nell's little sister, Nicole (a “moron” we're told), catches on fire. Lara figures that she can put it out with a bottle of brandy, so she pours it all over the shrieking kid and, well, “Nicole exploded like a Molotov cocktail.” Even her own parents “thought that it was probably for the best” when she dies after lingering in the hospital for a while. Nell lived but got covered with gnarly scars so no one visited her at the hospital or called her on the phone while she recovered because gross. The second they could sign out, her family fled town
Now, six years later, they're all still assholes. Lara meets Percy Chand, Canadian orphan, Rachel decides she wants him, too, and plows Lara into a tree while skiing, gliding away, cackling, leaving her "friend" possibly concussed and bleeding from her scalp. Percy and his friend, Cal, come over for a party at the unsupervised ski lodge, and Cal turns out to be a date rapist but that's okay because according to her friends, there's nothing Dana "likes better than a good feel” and she loves boys who are “aggressive.” Then Dana goes missing, Celeste turns out to be an amazing cook who whips up a roast chicken feast, they all play charades (again), Nell nearly gets thrown into yet another fire, and Pike honors the law of Chekhov's Propane Tank: if you show a propane tank in the first chapter, it must explode by the last.
Lara gets trapped outside in a snowstorm and has to pee on her hands to warm them enough to fire a flare gun and get rescued, she winds up scrumping in the snow with Percy when she's supposed to be looking for lost and almost-dead Dana, then Celeste reveals that she's actually her own hideously burned and presumed dead little sister Nicole (“Grotesque lumps were her breasts.”) whose parents pretended she was dead because they were so grossed out at her scars. She and Nell have teamed up to murder everyone for not visiting Nell in the hospital, but Lara manages to burn Nell again, this time to death, and, in an EC Comics level twist, Nicole winds up scarring the only unburnt parts of her body, her face and “My hands! The skin’s coming off!”
Welcome to the harsh, unforgiving universe of Christopher Pike.
His second book, Weekend (1986), is Slumber Party all over again, right down to a game of charades and a giant feast being whipped up in the middle of the night. But this time the teenagers have gone to a house in middle-of-nowhere Mexico so instead of being snowy it's boiling hot and the crime they committed years ago was drugging their friend Robin (and I use the term “friend” loosely because what is a “friend” in the Pike-iverse?) with Insect Death at a party and ruining her kidneys. She “did not leave the hospital until two months later, twenty pounds lighter and a ghastly yellow with a slightly damaged liver and two all but useless kidneys.” It’s a harsh world for teenagers.
Now, Robin’s sister, Lena, has invited everyone to her mansion in Mexico and they've barely arrived before Sol's van explodes, taking the garage with it, the phones are cut, charades are played, and everyone winds up drugged and stashed in the home recording studio where they’re menaced by a rattlesnake death trap. By the time this book is over, everyone's been bitten four or five times by snakes, poisoned, un-poisoned, a cute British boy with green eyes and floppy brown hair turns out to be a secret twin, and someone's sabotaging Robin's dialysis. As the main character says, “This was madness! But she liked it!”
By the end, Robin gets a surprise kidney transplant from her formerly unknown twin brother and it turns out this was all a plot he engineered to make sure Robin was worthy of his kidney, her worthiness confirmed when she sings “Blackbird” beautifully at the moment when everyone has pretty much poisoned everyone else. The epilogue reaches peak Pike when her friends visit the hospital, find Robin's sister reading Playgirl in the waiting room (“Lena closed the magazine, tossing it a couple of seats over for some innocent young girl to find and be corrupted by”), and then she tells Robin's boyfriend that her emaciated, formerly-dying sister is eating too much (“You’re going to have to talk to her, Park. You don’t want a pig for a girlfriend”).
I mean, she was dying and unable to eat anything for almost a year, and her recovery is miraculous, but Pike knows the truth about teenaged boys: fuck your health, no one wants a pig for a girlfriend.
The crazy stalker is a common trope in teen books yet Pike manages to make his stalkers crazier and more intense than most, probably because his normal characters are so batshit in the first place that a stalker has to go way over the top to even get noticed out. In Fall Into Darkness (1990) all the teenaged characters talk like hardbitten noir femme fatales and act crazier than a sack full of rattlesnakes while plotting to kill, frame, or screw each other.
Sharon McKay is on trial for murdering rich snob, Ann Rice, and her court-appointed attorney, John Richmond, is a yuppie who is not only very good at his job but if he gets her off the hook she'll have to sleep with him, so if she wins, she loses. In flashbacks we learn that not only was Ann Sharon's former best friend but she also wants Sharon to die because her brother, Jerry, killed himself over her. Also she’s mad that Sharon has her “life in order” and a piano scholarship to Julliard. But really, this is just what best friends do in Pike's world.
With the assistance of Paul, an unstable handyman at her family's estate, Ann engineers a complicated plot to fake her own suicide that involves a campout with friends, a cliffside walk with Sharon, screaming “Don't!” before hurling herself off the cliff while secretly tied to a 500 foot rope. The plan goes off without a hitch and everyone assumes that Sharon pushed Ann off the cliff and she gets sent to jail and stands trial. We learn, however, that Ann's plan had some flaws, like the fact that when she plunges off the cliff, and falls endlessly, and finally reaches the end of the 500 foot rope it almost breaks her back, slamming her into the cliff, and shattering her right arm.
She's rescued by Paul's brother, Chad, one of their classmates who drags shattered body to a secret cave known as “Stalker's Nook” where he tells her that he loves her and staged the murder of her brother because he thought they might be having incest and coming between their true love. Later, he lures Sharon to that same cave, where she discovers Ann's corpse at the bottom of an underground river. “The fish in the river must have been hungry. Ann’s eyes were missing. Sharon turned away and vomited.” Later, she'll fight Chad on the same cliff from which Ann hurled herself, and wins by convincing him to kill himself. Then her lawyer gets her off the hook and the book ends with him inviting her out to dinner and Sharon realizes that now she has to sleep with him, and ugh, the Pikeverse is just horrible thing after another, punching you in the face and making you have sex against your will, and that’s pretty much what life is like when you’re a teenager, so well done, Christopher Pike. Well done.