Christopher Pike is the author of many thrillers for teens. His real name is, well, I'm going to respect his privacy and not tell you. That would like totally defeat the entire purpose of having a pen name in the first place. But anyway, he was born in Brooklyn, New York in November 1954, but grew up in Los Angeles, California. He got his pen name from the crippled capitain in the first Star Trek series. Pike dropped out of college to work as a computer programmer, and tried his skills as a science fiction writer. When not successful in the sci-fi realm, he began writing thrillers for teens. In 1985, he published his first book, Slumber Party, which is a book about a group of teenage girls that are stalked by a murderer during their ski weekend. Slumber Party became a bestseller as where his two following books, Weekend and Chain Letter.
Pike is not married. He enjoys running, astronomy, transcendental meditation, reading, and surfing.
Comment from Biography Today about Pike: "Although his plots were occasionally far-fetched, Pike was so good at building and maintaining suspense that his readers didn't care. And unlike many other writers for young adults, Pike didn't talk down to his teenage audience. His books presented well-defined characters who, like teens everywhere, went to dances, threw parties, fell in love, and had trouble communicating with parents. But they often chose extreme or unusual ways to deal with their problems. In his early books, Pike often relied on young female narrartors whose observations about people and events were essential to the novel's plot. He was fascinated by females in general, because they seemed more complex, and it was easier for them to show their fear. But young adults of both sexes started to buy his books. Pike's thrillers eventually led to a boom in the horror market for teenagers, replacing sports and adventure stories for boys as well as the romances that had traditionally attracted young female readers."
Comments from Pike:
"It [writing] gives me a chance to go back to high school. When I was a teenager, I was shy and seldom had any fun. But the kids in my books, they have such wild times, they're lucky to make it to the last page."
"Too often, authors seem to feel that teenagers are only worried about getting a date for the prom and wearing the latest fashion. These things are important to teenagers, sure, but so are a lot of other things."
"The mind of a killer is an empty thing."
Pike considers science fiction authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein his major influences, as well as mystery writer Agatha Christie and horror maestro Stephen King.
Pike writes about evil in all its forms. Sometimes he depicts the simple, garden variety evil, such as the spiteful cruelty that motivates the drug-addicted teens in Die Softly to kill off each other. More often, however, it is evil on a cosmic scale-eternal, enduring, monumental and nearly unstoppable. For example, the evil power that animates Madame Olga Scheimer, the mistress of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler in Pike's The Wicked Heart, and survives beyond World War II to inhabit Scheimer's grandson, turning him into a serial killer. The evill of the "Caretaker" in the Chain Letter series compels innocent young people to do terrible acts or risk death. Finally, the evil of the Black Wanderers of the Remember Me series are creatures whose contempt for the human race is surpassed only by their hatred of the good Wanderers who wish to help humanity. In physical form, these evil forces appear as a gaseous clouds, a black slug, or a lizard. Where they come from and where they go after they are deafeated, Pike is never too specific. But he is certain of one thing: that only through love and self-sacrifice can good triumph.
Pike often invites us to identify and even sympathize with lonely, alienated, even morally ambivalent characters. Take, for example, the tough, independent vampire Sita (aka Alisa) in The Last Vampire series ot the confused and emotionally tortured serial killer, Dusty Shane in The Wicked Heart.
He's not afraid to depict murder realistically and graphically. Characters often meet violent, gory, painful ends. They are bludgeoned with hammers (The Wicked Heart), decapitated and set on fire (Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil), eaten by sharks and nearly buried alive (Remember Me 3: The Last Story). These stories are not for the faint hearted.
On the other hand, Pike isn't afraid to tackle big, important issues. Sprinkling his stories with religious metaphors and New Age spirituality, the author explores concepts like reincarnation (the Remember Me series), the burden of immortality (The Starlight Crystal and The Immortal) and the temptation to change the future (The Eternal Enemy, See You Later). Questions of death and reincarnation inform the Remember Me series, which feature a young girl named Shari Cooper who comes back from the dead as a "Wanderer"- a soul given permission to take the place of another soul in a mature body. In Remember Me 3: The Last Story, Shari becomes a bestselling author of YA horror herself and readers will be interested in following Shari as she meets her fans, copes with Hollwood producers who want to film her novels and struggles with the writing processs itself.
"Scary books are good. Contrast in life is good. If everything was the same everyday, it would be no fun. You cannot have great heroes without evil villians." -the wise yogi in Remember Me 3: The Last Story
Discussion Questions:
1. Discuss the moral ambiguities of supenatural creatures like Sita and Shari Cooper and human monsters like Dusty Shane. Is it all right to feel sorry for them? how do you justify their actions? In real life is it common for people who commit crimes to rationalize and thereby justify what they've done? What are the moral ambiguities in "smaller" acts of deceit, such as: copying homework, cheating on a test or lying to parents?
2. Christopher Pike's stories reflect parts of his own psyche, such as Marvin, the bestselling teenage writer in Master of Murder, and Shari Cooper, the horror novelist in Remember Me 3: The Last Story. What can you hypothesize about the author's values, beliefs and fears from his many other titles? Do any patterns emerge or is each novel diferent in perspective?