When I read Clarke’s book, it totally changed my life. He was one of the three big sci-fi writers, along with Asimov and Heinlein. You know, in 7th grade I read Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. I can’t believe I’m talking to you.Ĭhristopher Pike: Sarah, I’m like the most normal, boring person. May it answer your questions too, dear grown-up Pike obsessive, and rekindle your affection for the writer who walked your teen soul through murder, reincarnation, and other adolescent messiness. After a few emails, questions sent in advance to put the normally reclusive Pike at ease, he agreed to talk, as I struggled not to dissolve into a fangirling mess.īelow are excerpts from the interview and later emails, edited for length and clarity. But of course he hadn’t - and with the help of an internet that didn’t exist during the heat of my Pike mania, I tracked down Kevin McFadden, pen name Christopher Pike. 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.

Monster by Christopher Pike