Grady Hendrix

Christopher Pike, I can't quit you! I’m too old to have read Pike as a kid, so my foray into the Pikeverse took place relatively recently, and I just can’t stop Piking. And I could go on Piking from now until the end of time and still not have scratched the surface of his oeuvre. So let’s strap ourselves to the mast, stuff our ears with wax, and prepare to follow Commander Pike straight on into the Seas of Insanity.

If you thought teenage serial killers, football-playing space vampires, and reincarnated Greek goddesses poisoning each other with powdered glass while on vacation sounded wild, wait until you try Pike’s reincarnated Nazi serial killers, abortion ghosts, angels from beyond space and time who drive Ferraris, and herpes.

Get ready for a Pike-a-Palooza!

(Needless to say, you can’t discuss Pike without talking about his wild endings so there are spoilers for the following books. But with so much Pike to choose from, there’s plenty left out there that I haven’t ruined.)

THE WICKED HEART is about a classic Pike Bad Boy named Dusty Shame:

▪ floppy brown hair - check!

▪ green eyes - check!

▪ named could be a cocktail at a pretentious mixology joint - check!

▪ he's a serial killer - check!

“Dusty may have been crazy,” Pike writes. “But he was also a nice young man...He was on his way to college, that is if he didn’t make a quick stop at the electric chair first.”

Dusty is a serial killer with two kills already to his credit.

“Maybe if he’d spoken to more girls and listened to their voices instead of the one within his head, he wouldn’t have become a murderer.”

Maybe! But then we wouldn't be treated to scenes of astonishing cruelty. Dusty meets girls through an online community named Einstein, arranges to meet them for a date IRL, sneaks into their houses before said first date, throws a towel over their heads to keep everything clean, then smashes their skulls in with ballpeen hammer. He leaves behind as little blood as possible and disposes of their bodies in a secret cave so their parents keep hoping that maybe their daughters have been kidnapped or run away and are still out there alive.

As this carnage carousel begins to spin, Dusty’s planning to kill a girl from his chemistry class, Nancy Bardella, but when he sneaks into her house she wakes up right before he tosses his towel over her head, recognizes him from school, and says, “Hello!” It throws off his aim and he winds up breaking the bridge of her nose, and a whole lot of her face, before managing to beat her to death. The next day, he goes to Chem class and sits by Sheila Hardholt who used to have a crush on Dusty, “His wide green eyes were clear panes of sensitivity, yet the rest of his face was as inscrutable as a blank page.”

Then she tells him that Nancy has a crush on him, but she’s not in class today…funny, she usually sits up front. Oh, well, the next time Nancy sees him she'll probably ask him out.

“Nancy and I are never going out,” Dusty intones.

Sheila gets nervous that no one knows where Nancy is, but she can't get any adults to care, until Lt. Black shows up. He believes all these murders are connected and, like most teens in a Christopher Pike novel, Sheila says she wants in on the investigation and Lt. Black agrees to let this 18 year old kid interview the families of the victims. A lot of hoohah happens about the internet, but what it all boils down to is that Dusty's mother, whom he thinks has Alzheimer's, is actually the secret lovechild of Madame Scheimer and Heinrich Himmler, the guy who built the concentration camps.

But these two love Nazis are actually merely empty vessels for disembodied psychic pain vampires from beyond time and space, and now they've skipped a generation and are haunting Dusty Shame and causing him to kill. Sheila winds up tracking him down to his secret trophy cave where she tries to convince him to kill himself (see, Fall Into Darkness). Pathetically, he asks if she'd still go on a date with him now that she knows he's a vessel for psychic Nazi pain vampires from beyond time and space.

“After you get help, yes,” the stalwart Sheila says. “We can do that.”

He tells her he'll take her to McDonald's, she says she'd like that, then he smiles and says, “I have never had a friend in my life,” and shoots himself in the head. His blood and brains mist gently over Sheila's face like a bitter memory. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a cruel and unfair world. Christopher Pike just writes about it.

Life is just as horrible in THE LOST MIND which begins when Jennifer Hobbs wakes up next to the corpse of a young girl covered in blood. “Her yellow sweater was so red it could have been a Christmas gift from a psychotic Santa,” Pike writes, as only he can.

Jennifer discovers that the dead body belongs to her best friend, Crystal Denger, but she can't remember anything about what happened, or about her life, so she gives the cops a particularly unsatisfactory account of their night out together. Because not a single detail of what she says adds up in any way, shape, or form, Jennifer becomes murder suspect number one. Cue the arrival of Amir, Crystal's “exotic” boyfriend who's been cheating on her with Jennifer. This being a Pike book, you start counting the seconds before Jennifer discovers they’re reincarnated lovers from the dawn of time or lost aliens from the another dimension or cyborgs from the future fated to murder one another.

Sure enough, through a series of very, very long dream sequences, and several extensive diary entries, Jennifer discovers that Allah creates each person as three souls and places each soul in a different body and the aware ones will spend eternity chasing the other two parts of their souls around and around in a neverending cycle of pain and despair. She, Amir, and Crystal were all part of the same soul and Amir has pursued them down through time because he wants to murder them for very complicated reasons.

This book teaches that you should stonewall police investigations whenever you're the main suspect in a murder. Jenny gets further than the cops because she’s putting pieces together and using her knowledge of people she knows personally and relying on her emotions about what feels might be wrong, while the dumb cops use evidence to chase deadend leads. It all ends with a complicated soul-switching scam that sees Jennifer murder herself, trap Amir's soul in Hell, and take over his body. She strolls off into the sunset, happy as a clam, bending the boundaries of gender identity decades before it was a thing.

SEE YOU LATER begins, “It began with a smile, or at least that’s what I thought. But then, I didn’t think much when I was eighteen. I just longed for things I didn’t have, and reacted when they came to me and I no longer wanted them.” Which proves that Pike can flat-out write when he's not busy being weird or murdering teenagers. Then it all gets weird, and murdery, in this story about unrequited teenage love that somehow revolves around video game designers getting relationship coaching from future versions of themselves who seem to come from a parallel timeline in which the Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war.

Traveling back in time, or between dimensions, these future versions of the main characters try to avert the apocalypse by making sure the right characters are making out with each other, while also designing nuclear war video games that teach players that Armageddon is ultimately unwinnable, just like Wargames. Things go firmly off the rails when it turns out that the future versions of the main characters are actually...angels? Called Illumni, they're “A superior race from another star system.” But also maybe human souls that are so advanced they've become balls of light?

This is confusing, but it's nothing compared to Whisper of Death which is maybe Pike's most mind-bending book of all time.

WHISPER OF DEATH starts with a patented Pike first line, “I sit alone in a dead world,” uttered by teenaged tough girl, Roxanne. She's recently been knocked up by her boyfriend, Pepper, and while she wants to keep the baby, he wants her to have an abortion. They drive to a nearby town to get it and Rox gets her feet all the way up in stirrups and gets anesthetic before she changes her mind.

Fortunately, the doctor and nurse stepped out for a minute and she and Pepper ditch the suddenly empty clinic and shack up in a nearby motel. She tells him she's having the baby and he sort of shrugs. They drive home and realize that the entire town is abandoned, all the TV and radio stations have gone off the air, and they are the last two people left in the world.

Wait, no. Actually they find three other survivors and also begin to see the ghost of redheaded Betty Sue McCormick who recently poured gasoline all over herself and struck a match to commit suicide in the most painful way possible. Each of the survivors was connected to Betty Sue and as they see her ghost flitting about more and more frequently, they uncover a stash of her painfully bad short stories, and learn that each of them wronged Betty Sue in some way, and now she’s going to murder them all.

One of them gets shot in the dick, one of them burns to death, another gets skewered on a pitch fork, and by the end, only Rox is left and she thinks there's no possible way anything can happen to her because she never did anything wrong to Betty Sue...but then she discovers that BETTY SUE IS THE GHOST OF HER ABORTION FROM THE FUTURE AND SHE'S STILL IN THE CLINIC GETTING READY FOR HER D&C AND THE GHOST ABORTION HAS PSYCHIC POWERS AND HAS CREATED A BOTTLE UNIVERSE WHERE SHE'LL TORTURE ROX FOR ETERNITY.

Jesus H. Christ. I can't even.

There are no pain Nazis, future angels, or ghost abortions in GIMME A KISS but that doesn't keep it from being one of Pike's most evil books yet. A return to teen thrillers in the vein of Die Softly and Fall Into Darkness this is another book about mean teens who are such total assholes that one of them decides to fake her own suicide to teach her shitty friends a lesson.

Why does Jane Retton want to fake her suicide? Because her friends photocopied her diary and spread it all over school. Even worse, it was full of sexual fantasies about scrumping lots of kids she'd never actually scrumped in her life. It totally torpedoes her social life and Patty, who did the photocopying, doesn't even care.

Jane had to struggle to keep standing.
”You — you won’t get away with this.”
Patty leaned close. “Janey, old buddy, I already have.”
Jane sat down, lowered her face to her arms, and began to cry.

Ouch.

After faking her suicide by falling off a sailboat, Jane makes it to the mountain cabin of another friend and learns that she's screwed the pooch: her boyfriend died while searching for her “corpse” and now someone's shooting at her! Then her dumb friend gets caught in the crossfire and dies. Jane goes full HAM and discovers that the killer is the nice, meek “good girl” daughter of the local dentist. Why's she killing everyone? Because she's dying...of VD!!!

But not really. She only has herpes, but her dad has such messed up ideas about sex he's convinced his daughter that the herp is going to kill her horribly and cause her face to rot off and she wants to take everyone out with her before she goes. Jane beats her down and laughs in her face over her poor comprehension of human health and VD, but barely survives the final death trap the good girl constructed for her.

There's something about the fact that it's a book about herpes called Gimme a Kiss for reasons that only become apparent in the final pages that makes this feel like Pike's meanest, most cynical book yet. And that's saying a LOT. Because the Pikeverse is a mean and cynical place.