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Not the Star Trek guy, the prolific author of the 80s and 90s. His books were a big part of my childhood, they were all spooky or spooky adjacent and the main characters were usually older teens so it never felt like I was reading a kids book. The covers were always great and each book had a wild premise. A fun thing about them was that it was usually pretty hard to guess where the story would go because they would get pretty wild sometimes. Like "The Eternal Enemy" starts out about a VCR that is recording tomorrow's news and eventually reveals the VCR wasn't special at all but actually the main character was secretly (even to herself) a robot from the future.
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Apr 9, 2023 21:44
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:37 |
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He did some "lo I am an ancient sexy vampire" books that were ok iirc
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May 17, 2023 20:02
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I loved these books as a kid. Some of the stories are absolutely burned into brain to this day because of how wild they were, especially for kid-me because they were the first real exposure to more adult freaky weird stuff (plenty of kids books have freaky weird elements, but these were mixed in with drugs, sex, and older teen issues that my parents definitely didn't know about and probably assumed they were just a different sort of Goosebumps). The first one I read was Remember Me  The plot starts so innocuous and ends so insane. The OP is an absolutely horrible person, the epitome of a stuck up popular high school girl who gets a Ferrari for a graduation present. She is quickly murdered and becomes a ghost trying to solve her own murder. Despite being a ghost, she is bound by the physical realm and has to either break into places by climbing through windows or up drainpipes or sneak in behind someone, which I remember finding odd as a kid, but ok, fairly normal so far. I don't remember much of the bulk of the story aside from how much effort it was for her to do things like get into someone's car due to her ghost limitations, so I think a lot of the plot was spent on being an invisible but corporeal ghost. BUT THEN. The climax: she was murdered by her brother's girlfriend, who was actually the brother's real sister because the narrator and the girlfriend were switched at birth. The girlfriend knew this and was really mad about it for reasons, so she knowingly dated her own brother in order to get revenge on them (why???) by killing them. Because she and her brother-boyfriend were both insulin dependent diabetics, her plan was to seduce her brother (  ) give him an insulin overdose and then inject him with an air embolism. The ghost narrator overcomes her corporeal ghost state to enter the air bubble as it is swimming through her not-brother's blood and pop it with ghost magic in a very weird scene.Other things I remember: there was another sad ghost boy who was in love with her, and they had a very awkward and bad sort of love story in between her having to figure out how to break into people's homes and cars as a ghost, and that none of that really mattered to solving her murder. She actually figured it out by using her ghost powers to watch people's dreams. Both the brother and his sister-girlfriend dream in black and white, so they're both colourblind and thus must actually be brother and sister because  It gave me an incredibly deep and lifelong fear of air bubbles in needles  Enfys fucked around with this message at 12:53 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 12:41
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Oh hey! I love these books. I’ve been collecting them ever since I was a pre-teen and I’m only missing a few of them. I pick up one to re-read fairly often as kind of a pallet cleaner between more “difficult books.” Some are definitely better than others, and it’s interesting to see Pike’s themes and writing style evolve over the years as he got more into mysticism. I think my favorite, very close with The Tachyon Web and The Eternal Enemy, is The Midnight Club. The premise is just so, so sad (a bunch of teens living in hospice care together) but the relationships between the characters and how they are each coping with unimaginable grief is very compelling. But somehow it has a happy ending that sure, it’s corny, but it works.
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Jun 4, 2023 19:56
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Netflix actually did an adaptation of The Midnight Club with Mike Flanagan that adapted a couple of his other stories. IIRC Netflix was going to produce more adaptations of Pike's stories but who knows at this point.
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Jun 4, 2023 20:27
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Where did you buy the whole lot? I’d kill to have these on my shelf - big part of my childhood - but I’m not in a place where I can pay $20 (shipping etc) per book. Especially considering they’re about a 45-minute read. Remember Me was awesome.
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Jun 14, 2023 19:34
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My favorite was The Starlight Crystal
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Jun 16, 2023 04:03
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Hyzenth1ay posted:Where did you buy the whole lot? I’d kill to have these on my shelf - big part of my childhood - but I’m not in a place where I can pay $20 (shipping etc) per book. Especially considering they’re about a 45-minute read. I check thrift stores/used book stores for his books. It has seriously taken me over 20 years to amass my collection, I really love these dumb books. I’m still missing some though  
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Jun 16, 2023 04:48
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| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:37 |
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That's beautiful 
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Jun 16, 2023 11:03
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