Much like Mary Blanc, Christopher Pike is on a mission. The author delivers the inciting incident of Monster with breakneck speed; he gets right to the killing. In only the first few paragraphs of the 1992 young-adult novel, Mary shoots two people dead at a party before her best friend Angela Warner stops her. Everything seems safe now, but after learning Mary’s bizarre motive, Angela realizes the real danger has “only just begun.”
Brian Kotzky’s artwork for Monster proposes a sort of creature story in the vein of vintage “B” movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf; the cover shows a high-school cheerleader walking beside a red-eyed football player. Pike more than delivers on the cover’s promise, and he does it sooner than other authors might. Rather than having the new girl in town slowly come upon the presence of an unnatural threat, Angela is thrown headfirst into the heart of darkness once Mary obliterates two of their classmates. Angela’s first three months in Point were quiet until the night of Jim Kline’s party. She still cannot fathom her best friend Mary killing anyone, yet the victims, Todd Green and Kathy Baker, say otherwise. Or they would have had their bodies not been shot to pieces. If not for Angela, Mary might have claimed one more victim; she fully intended to kill the party’s host, who so happens to be her ex.
Everyone is quick to label this a case of a jilted teen using a shotgun to get over a breakup, but Angela refuses to accept the popular narrative. Angela’s first talk with Mary since the incident creates doubt as well as ponders the supposed monsters in question. “Todd and Kathy were not human beings anymore. That’s why I killed them,” Mary explains in jail. Her story — Jim, Todd, and Kathy lured two couples to a warehouse for an orgy, but they instead ate them — would be too out there for anyone else to believe. Angela, however, is curious to a fault. And, despite all the conjecture going around, she still trusts Mary would not kill someone unless she had a good reason.
A good deal of ’90s YA pulp emphasizes human transgressors, including stalkers and fatal rivals. Any dip into uncanniness in these kinds of books often took the form of ghosts, and on occasion, witches, werewolves, and vampires. Pike, on the other hand, left Earth altogether to find his monsters. The imaginative author, whose pen name is inspired by a Star Trek character, channels his love of sci-fi when explaining the creatures’ distinct origin. This sharp and thorough turn into pseudoscience happens to be one of the book’s most successful elements.
The bloodthirsty antagonists of Christopher Pike’s Monster can be traced to Point Lake, a local body of water formed 100,000 years ago by a meteor. And said meteor was, as speculated by a geology professor named Dr. Alan Spark, a fragment of the original fifth planet from the Sun before it was destroyed and eventually replaced in orbit by Jupiter. The story only gets weirder from here on out. In short, the lake’s highly magnetic water in combination with an alien micro-organism is now turning the young people of Point into what are essentially vampires. This alternative mythos for creatures so ubiquitous in the horror genre is as unexpected as it is intriguing. Then comes a compelling and expressive subplot about Angela’s burgeoning sexuality in relation to her own extraterrestrial affliction. Jim’s preternatural allure disarms Angela’s defenses, as well as opens the door to a different kind of desire that goes far beyond physical hunger.
While she might feel alone in her journey, Angela does have support. There is of course Mary, who is a shadow of her former self; she provides guidance from behind bars, and later the motivation for Angela to finish what her best friend started. Then there is the officer assigned to Mary’s case and trailing Angela, Lieutenant Nguyen. The Vietnam War veteran turned cop serves as the book’s only anchor to reality, but his loyalty shifts once the veil between the two worlds fades away. Dr. Spark is not the Peter Vincent to Angela’s Charley Brewster on account of his concern of being academically discredited, yet he validates her fringe theory when he easily could have turned her away. As for dear Kevin, he is always the friend and never the boyfriend. Without him, though, Angela would have never realized her ability to regret and mourn is what separates her from the other monsters. The real ones.
In an interview with Gabrielle Moss, author of Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction, Pike said, “Right from the start, I decided I wouldn’t talk down to my readers. I’d write my YA books the same way I was writing my adult books — only the characters would be younger.” Pike did not mince words when it came to subject matters rarely covered by his contemporaries. Not everything he wrote about teenage romance and sex is agreeable in retrospect, but the bold and otherworldly manner in which he examined such topics is without a doubt why so many curious young folks flocked to his books back then. Pike injected his stories with as much earnest emotions as he did carnality and gruesome violence.
Christopher Pike’s Monster is a wild ride from start to finish, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down once they begin. As always, Pike adeptly balances drama and dread in his writing while also putting a unique stamp on a concept as familiar and timeless as teenagers turning into unspeakable creatures of the night. To this day Monster remains a high point in Pike’s already distinguished output.
There was a time when the young-adult section of bookstores was overflowing with horror and suspense. These books were easily identified by their flashy fonts and garish cover art. This notable subgenre of YA fiction thrived in the ’80s, peaked in the ’90s, and then finally came to an end in the early ’00s. YA horror of this kind is indeed a thing of the past, but the stories live on at Buried in A Book. This recurring column reflects on the nostalgic novels still haunting readers decades later.
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