Who is Christopher Pike, really? And how does a mere writer become Christopher Pike, spinner of teen nightmares and dreams?įor two decades I’d believed on some level that when I stopped being a teen Pike fan, he’d simply ceased to exist. And the mystery that had obsessed me came back: Who is Christopher Pike, really? And how does a mere writer become Christopher Pike, spinner of teen nightmares and dreams? Night after night, heroines and villains reemerged from browning paperbacks. Reading Pike as an adult was like going home. After our conversation, my most industrious friend, Becca, nabbed lots of Pike books on eBay and handed copies to me at our kids’ school pick-up. Women in our 30s and 40s, perhaps we’d now reached the age where childhood obsessions naturally reemerge. There was no Pike, but I mentioned him to my friends, who immediately spun into nostalgia with me. Months ago, at a library warehouse store, I instinctively scanned the “P” section in fiction - muscle memory from my years of going for Pike books first. Occasionally I’d pick up Sati, his adult novel about a girl who thought she was God - but put the rest away with other childish things. Then, like the rest of Pike’s readers in the ’90s, I grew up. I knew little about the man whose words spurred my spiritual questions and the near-sex-scenes that kept my likewise nerdy friends passing his books around like precious contraband. I reread and reread his books, hunting for breadcrumbs about Pike himself. I not only loved Pike’s twisted universe, I wanted to grow into a version of him. My own notebooks overran with dark tales as I attempted to leap from obsessive reader to writer. At school, they sat atop my Trapper Keeper and then accompanied me to bed each night, a reminder that ghosts, gods, and monsters lurked outside my door.

Death hung over those books, like a Ouija board at a drinking party, a mashup of teen mortality and fun. My adolescence was the standard tragi-teen state, but it was illuminated by the neon splash of Christopher Pike titles.

Christopher pike the party