To paraphrase Mink Stole in Pink Flamingos, “There are two kinds of people in this world, Christopher Pike people and assholes.” Taken in large quantities, Christopher Pike books will shake your sanity and destroy your worldview, only to rebuild it into something both awesome and terrible. You will see civilization as merely a stage where short-tempered teens strut and fret and play charades while occasionally faking their suicides. Welcome to the Pikeverse.
Die Softly (1991) is like a lot of Pike’s other high school thrillers, only with way more cocaine and a plot right out of a De Palma movie: Herb Trasker is a high school loser who hides a camera in the girl's locker room to get shots of the cheerleaders showering. What he gets instead are shots of one of them murdering the other. “His blood was hot. His thoughts were naughty," Pike writes of Herb, basically describing every single character in this book. It turns out that two evil cheerleaders were getting everyone hooked on cocaine and sex and then murdering them and making it look like suicide. By the time it's all over we've gotten plenty of patented Pike mayhem (Pikehem?) when Herb witnesses one of the cheerleaders burning to death in her car (“The girl’s face was nothing more than that of a mummy’s — a mummy that had fallen into a vat of corrosive acid.”), as well as a bit of S&M, and finally a direct and deeply disturbing look directly into the black sun that burns darkly at the center of the Pikeverse. This moment comes when Herb and his buddy Theo stand next to each other on an electronics assembly line where they both work after school, soldering chips into VCRs. These two boys are dim-witted, incapable of reading books because they're “too complicated,” and Theo is often drunk, given to shooting up people's back yards when the mood takes him. Here, he asks Herb to level with him: Does he honestly think that two guys like them could ever get girlfriends? “I mean real girlfriends, someone we could marry someday.” Herb gazes into the cold, empty void of infinite space and replies: “We’ll probably get married someday — just about everyone does. But it’ll probably be to someone other than the person we really want to marry.” Theo’s only reply is silence.
More cocaine, please!
Lavish meals are consumed and charades are played in The Eternal Enemy (1993) one of Pike's bonkers supernatural/superscience books that balance his more down-to-earth teen thrillers. This one is strangely obsessed with the fact that only a VCR with four heads can slow down the moment when Mel Gibson crosses the room naked in Lethal Weapon so that a young woman can really enjoy the sight of his exposed buns. What no one tells Rela Lindquist, recently arrived from “back east” burdened by a mysterious past, is that the VCR she purchases at Circuit City for $280 is also capable of so much more: it can tape local news from the future.
The first thing she does is take her preacher father for $500 betting on a football game because she can see tomorrow’s scores. Then she drives to Vegas and takes a sports bookie for $20,000. Before long, however, her VCR is showing her a very different kind of news report: her own horrible murder happening in less than 24 hours (“Police who first arrived at the scene said that it appeared as if her body had been torn apart by a psychotic with a saw and hammer”). Rela heads to the mall, tries to buy a 12 gauge shotgun, gets turned down because she's underage, settles for a Swiss Army knife, then a Haagen-Daz milkshake, then she meets a creepy old man in gray sweats with “Day-Glo eyes.”
It turns out that this is her grandfather from the future and she is actually a cyborg named Robotic Experimentation Logistical Algorithm, also from the future, tasked to travel back in time and murder the man who will help the cyborgs overthrow humanity by combining a microchip with monkey sperm to breed a super-smart cyborg monkey, and this turns out to be her boyfriend who she loves him too much to murder, and so she dooms humanity to an enslaved future because she's horny.
“Some cyborg,” she moans in despair. “I couldn’t find the switch to turn off the tears.”
The Immortal (1993) gives us mean teens absolutely not playing charades, but instead eating their way through Greece and also eating large amounts of powdered glass they put into each other’s hamburgers. Turns out that they're actually reincarnated Greek goddesses doomed to be horrible to one another down through eternity and it ends with both lead characters dying, once again, but not before stopping off at nude beaches, stealing each other's boyfriend, and the main character's screenwriter dad delivering a six-page plot synopsis for his sci-fi opus, Last Contact.
It's fine, if you like that kind of thing, but Pike's greatest achievement in teen supernatural books might be Monster (1992) which starts with his best opening line (“Angela Warner was on the couch finishing her third beer when Mary Blanc entered Jim Kline’s house carrying a loaded shotgun.”) topped only by its closing line (“People were not for eating”). In between, there is so much crazy.
After Mary Blanc shotguns a cheerleader (“Mary pointed her shotgun at Kathy’s face and pulled the trigger. The blast caught Kathy in the forehead and took off the top of her skull, plastering a good portion of her brains over the railings of the nearby staircase”) and a football player (“The blast went right through his guts and painted the wall behind him a lumpy red”) she tries to murder her boyfriend, football hunk, Jim Kline. He runs like a frightened little sissy and gets saved when Angela, the new girl in town from “back east,” manages to distract Angela long enough for the gimpy cop, Lt. Nguyen, to get the drop on her. In jail, Mary tells Angela she's killing everyone because they're “not human.”
Ha ha, you're crazy, Angela thinks, but then Mary tells her she followed these three football jocks one night because they had gotten way too good at footballing and cheerleading for it to be entirely natural. She sees them pick up four people in a bar and “I caught the words party and orgy and warehouse.” At said warehouse, she sees them do something other than party or orgy because they're monsters and “what do monsters have for dinner?” she asks, pointedly.
“Mary had a sick imagination,” Angela thinks. “Maybe she could write horror books in prison and make a fortune.” But then Jim Kline takes her out on a date and tells her “Mary’s in jail. Mary’s going to stay in jail. Let’s not talk about her anymore.” Instead, he takes her swimming at the lake by her house where Jim reveals exactly what kind of monster he really is when he sticks his hand down her shirt, takes his pants off, suggests they go skinny dipping (“Nothing like this had ever happened to her in Chicago”), she pretends she can't swim to get out of it, then he bleeds all over her, she gets turned on, and thinks, “Maybe he's my kind of monster.”
Well, now she's a monster, too. Turns out the lake was created millions of years ago by a meteor that had space vampires on it and now they've woken up and gone nuts. They're infecting all the kids in town and that includes Angela who spends the rest of the book either screwing everyone she meets, trying very hard not to eat her lovable puppy, Plastic, and noshing on the corpse of her best friend who killed herself. The vampires lock her in the basement at a “party” at her house with her human best friend, Kevin, who asks what the heck is going on? Why aren't they playing charades?
"We are being held captive by thirty vampires from outer space,” Angela tells him.
She really doesn't want to eat Kevin, but when he bumps his head and bleeds, she can't keep herself from digging her fingers into his scalp wound then chowing down. The space vampires come to get her to join their lame party and murder everyone else in town, but fortunately Angela spent an entire chapter rigging the giant propane tank at her grandfather's house and turning it into a homemade bomb (she gives meticulous instructions on how anyone can do this with simple items they can purchase at the local hardware store or find around the home), so when they bring her upstairs to join the party the experienced Pike reader knows there’s only one way this book can end (see, Slumber Party).
Upstairs, Angela snaps back to reality when Jim acts like a jerky space vampire, kicks him in the nuts, almost loses it when the vampires defuse her big propane bomb, then sets off one of the two back-up bombs she’d hidden because she knows that “two is one, and one is none.” Angela dives out a window, the bombs go off, and all 30 kids/space vampires are incinerated. It turns out that the next stage in space vampire evolution is for the kids to morph into giant man-bats and we end with Angela living in the woods as a secret bat-woman, eating live deer, getting ticks, and trying very, very hard not to eat people.
As full of underaged sex and cannibalism as Monster is, however, it also perfectly illustrates the key tenet of the Pikeverse. The kids drink, screw, make bad decisions, and blow each other away with shotguns, just like adults. And as for the adults, they're entirely absent, showing up from time to time to act like idiots or to smile indulgently as their children run off to Vegas and gamble on football games. The fact is, in these books everyone over 21 is boring. The ones in control and having fun and getting murdered and taking cocaine are the kids, and they're doing all right. As Lt. Nguyen makes clear in Monster, watching Angela's homemade bombs wipe out the entire starting line-up of the Point High varsity football team:
"In the orange light of the fire Nguyen lowered his head and silently saluted Mary Blac and Angela Warner.”
So should we all.
