Monster

With Y/A horror now being a fixture to the blog, I figured that it's time to branch out of the world of R.L. Stine and cover some other notable horror for teens names. And what more prolific name to begin with than with Christopher Pike? Pike, similar to Stine, is an author who worked primarily in the horror department, particularly when it comes to books for young adults. He has written a large list of books, both standalone and in series, as well as had his own children's horror novella run with the 24-book Spooksville series, which also had a television show that aired on the now defunct Hub Network. And yes, I'll get to them at some point.

In 1985, Pike's first book, Slumber Party, turned out to be a successful book, but we're not covering that one just yet. We're going to start with one that I recently picked up that intrigues me. It's time to talk about Monster.

COVER STORY

This is a great cover. Very simple, but still striking. Something I like about the covers for most of Pike's work is the very horror movie feel of them. Mores o than most of contemporaries like Stine. And this one is, as stated, very simple. But the red glow and demonic eyes on the football player does enough to make for a memorable work. Although, if I'm honest, I do get a "end of the Thriller video" vibe, only sans cat eyes.

STORY

So we open this book with our protagonist Angela Warner at school quarterback Jim Kline's party. All seems to go well until Mary Blanc (listed as Mary Carlson in the back synopsis. Woops) just charges in with a double barrel shotgun and starts to shoot some of the other members of the football team. Like, this is the first few pages of this 229 page book. Pike starting in hot. She shoots Todd Green in the gut before blowing cheerleader Kathy Baker's head off. She aims for Jim, Mary's former boyfriend, before Angela stops her, only to get a kick in the head for her troubles. Jim manages to run off with Mary following and police sirens heard in the background. So yeah, that happened.

Cops arrive and get info from Angela about the incident and where Jim and Mary would end up. They tell Angela that they may have to kill Mary if she doesn't comply, so Angela runs off to try and find her first. Angela's current thoughts are that maybe Mary didn't take the breakup with Jim all that well and it led to her just doing what she did. I guess there's some irony for Angela as her parents recently divorced. She was moved from Chicago to live with her grandfather in Point Lake, Michigan for her senior year of high school. 

Angela finds Jim and tells him about Todd and Kathy. They head to her Toyota Camry when Mary shows up and points the shotgun at them. Angela tries to get an answer as to what's going on, but Mary tells her that Jim and the others aren't human. Before she can shoot Jim, the cops arrive and tell her to put the gun down lest she end up the next corpse. Mary does so, but dives into the bushes and gets out a revolver as, duh, she was well prepared for what she had planned on this night. She shoots Jim in the leg, but before she can yet again finish the job, the cop smashes her in the head with his revolver, finally knocking her out. Angela tends to Jim's wounds as we finish... chapter one? We had a murder spree and a police standoff all in 21 pages and one whole chapter. Strap yourselves in, folks, this is going to be a long'n.

The next day, Angela arrives at the police office and meets with Lieutenant Nguyen, the man who stopped Mary the previous night. She checks the pictures on his wall which show that he was a former captain in the South Vietnamese army, and highly decorated at that. He tells her that Mary is in her cell after being checked out of the hospital for concussion and an injured hand, but isn't saying why she did what she did. Angela has no clue, other than she knew that Mary was distancing herself from Jim, but didn't seem to have much of a connection to Todd or Kathy, making her actions even more bizarre. 

Before Angela goes to talk to Mary, she remembers their first meeting not long after coming to her Grandfather's lake house. She saw Mary dancing in the woods very gracefully. She seemed full of life, particularly in the sack with Jim as she's claimed, until the night of the murders. Angela talks to Mary in her cell, but she won't mention anything. Angela remembers her saying that Jim wasn't human and Mary finally mentions what she means. When football practice started, she noticed that Jim and Todd's abilities were almost inhuman, and she says that at cheerleading practice, she saw Kathy leap ten feet in the air for the human pyramid and later was weight lifting over a thousand pounds. She also just noticed that Jim acted different around her, almost as if his humanity had vanished.

Angela, of course, doesn't believe any of this since there are enough plausible answers. Maybe Todd and Jim just were really good at practice, and maybe she's embellishing the claims about Kathy. Or that maybe Jim was different because the relationship had gone south. None of them reasons to commit murder. Mary continues saying that the three went to a bar and coerced seven people to head to a warehouse to engage in an orgy. Mary followed, only to later see the three leaving, but not the couple. Kathy dumped a pair of garbage bags out and after the three left, Mary looked inside and saw a whole bunch of blood, but no body parts. She believes that maybe they ate the bodies to hide the evidence. 

So, Mary doesn't actually have any evidence and doesn't even remember what warehouse it was, but she thinks that with Jim out there, no one is safe. Case in point Carol McFarland and Larry Zurer, who she thinks may have become monsters, or were about to, hence why she never killed them at the party. But with them out and about, more members of the cheerleaders and football team could be affected. Angela leaves and tells Lieutenant Nguyen that she got nothing from Mary, then asks if Jim had been around, only to learn he just left. After she leaves, another cop brings Nguyen a tape of the conversation. He isn't sure about the whole monster thing, but does think there is something off about Jim Kline. He asks to keep Mary in jail while he searches the warehouses in town for anything.

At the funeral for Todd and Kathy, Angela talks to Jim. He tries to get an answer about why the shooting happened, but she says that Mary was speaking gibberish. Jim says that Mary mustn't have taken their break up very well. That she was stalking him for a while before the night of the murders. He then tells Angela that they can talk after his football game. And since Angela's into him, she agrees. Later, when she returns to her grandfather's, she gets visited by Kevin Christopher, her next door neighbor and unrequited love interest, especially now that she's into Jim Kline. Though given the fact he calls her "A and W" for both her first name and love of the beverages, maybe she's making the right call. But that's probably the least bizarre name as we learn that Angela's grandfather has a border collie... named Plastic. Maybe I give Stine too hard a time for his character names.

Angela tells Kevin about what Mary told her and he too believes she's crazy, but maybe she's not fully wrong. Before Point High opened the previous year, the students, including Kevin, went to Balton High. After everyone moved to Point, everyone seemed pretty happy, but suddenly, at the end of the football season, everyone started getting really sick all of a sudden with no clue as to what caused it. But it just went away not too long after. But what was odder was that only football players and cheerleaders were affected. But of the three notable names, only Kathy suffered. No clue about Todd or Jim. So, they chalk it up as Mary getting contaminated by whatever made the others sick and it affected her mind while compounded by the breakup. 

Both Angela and Kevin head to the library to check out any information about the building of Point High. They find a quote from the head of the contracting company talking about how hard the ground was due to the iron in the soil. But more importantly mentions stories that Point Lake was formed when a meteor struck. They deduce that the lake water might have been contaminated by whatever was on the meteor. Since Kevin and Angela's families get their water from a well, they're not affected, but maybe that's what affected Mary and sickened the football players and cheerleaders.

Angela goes to the football game which, sure enough, the Point High players are unstoppable, ending the game at 42-9. She meets with Jim after who tells her that he broke up with Mary and was interested in her more, which of course makes Angela more into him. They head to her grandfather's place and almost hit a propane tank. When Angela makes a comment about how it could have made a crater sized hole, Jim seems panicked. They walk for a bit where we learn that Jim's father owns 20 percent of the oil wells in town. After making out, Jim wants to go jump in the lake, though Angela's pensive due to the whole "meteor water" stuff. 

Jim goes starkers and jumps into the water. He tries to coax Angela in, but she claims she's got a cold. She also isn't feeling as comfortable with him as she was before, so she tries to run off. But he follows her. She sees him next to a tree with his arm cut up and takes him to the lake to clean it, while trying to make mention of if the water is actually drinkable. At the lake, he makes out with her again, only this time he gets blood over her. After some more hijinks, she finally returns home and goes to sleep. She dreams of being in a beautiful flowerbed before the sky suddenly starts raining blood and she gets attacked by some kind of blood monster, I think? Anyway, she wakes up and is now feeling sick, like she may have caught something from the lake. 

Kevin visits her the next day as Angela's still sick. She also sees that her grandfather left for Chicago for horse racing, and as the book as made it clear by now, likely to score with some women because he's somehow more horny than Angela is. She's still a bit on cloud nine over the previous night that she ends up shocked when Kevin hands her the paper saying that one of the opposing players in the game the previous night named Fred Keith was crippled from the neck down thanks to Larry Zurer, one of the two teens that Mary warned about. 

Speaking of Mary, that's who Angela goes to see, visiting her again in her jail cell. Though Lieutenant Nguyen says she'll likely be out on bail soon enough thanks to her family's high priced lawyer. She tells Mary about the injury and also that she's with Jim, which angers Mary, but also seems to make her jealous. She does at least mention that she remembers some bits of the warehouse as there were chicken crates and it was between Balton and Kally. Angela decides she's off to find clues, while Lieutenant Nguyen once again eavesdropped, so he's on the same trail. He's also reminded of his time as a captain in Vietnam and how one of the soldiers, a man named Tran Quan, was one of the most skilled killers. But when Tran raped a girl he had just murdered, Nguyen killed him immediately. That's the same vibe he gets from Jim Kline.

Angela and Kevin find a warehouse and sure enough find some dried blood. Kevin suggests going to the cops, but Angela is against that for now, especially since she was with Jim the previous night, and that she's still feeling sickly. She tells Kevin that she's been with Jim and it bothers him, but she promises to stop seeing him, which is going to be a blatant lie, especially given we're roughly halfway through the book. She then says she's going to do some research on "Indians" (this is a 1992 book, so of course) and if there's any history involving the natives who lived at Point Lake first. After she eats some McDonald's as her appetite has gotten weirdly more voracious.

She arrives at the library and gets some info on the natives, but more importantly to her she gets only one article about the meteor in the lake. How the meteor landed a hundred thousand years ago and is high in magnetic rock and it affects things like compasses for example, but no info on if the water's contaminated. The writer of the article was a man named Alan Spark who is a professor in Michigan, so we'll be meeting more of him later. On the Native Americans, she learns that the Manton tribe was driven off by the white people, because we really are a legacy of monsters. But she also learns that the lake was once called Sethia, or "Bath of Blood", which at first she thinks is strange, but given she went full Slayer with the raining blood dream, maybe that's not too far off.

Another word associated with Sethia is KAtuu, some kind of monster that isn't well described. It's either a bunch of small insects or bats, or something of the like. Either way, the Manton avoided the lake regardless. The librarian suggests that Angela heads out to see a man named Shining Feather and his great granddaughter who own a small shop off the highway. After eating some more food, she heads to Shining Feather's. She heads there and tries to get some answers, but Shining Feather doesn't give many. Mostly because he can't speak English and his great granddaughter has to interpret for him. He says that he doesn't want to talk about the lake. He was the one who tried to warn the white settlers about the lake water, but they ignored him, so he came up with the idea of using well water instead. 

Angela presses on, asking about the water and what its effects are, but he doesn't answer, nor to why the lake was called Sethia. But when she mentions KAtuu, he freaks out, as that word takes with it horrific history. But she tells him about the kids who have apparently changed and have possibly eaten people. He says that the lake is called the Bath of Blood because those who come in contact with the water gain an unstoppable appetite for blood, and the more contact with the water, the more they change. Angela worries that might affect her, even though she's just been eating a lot more meat lately. She gets kicked out of the shop, not before Shining Feather gives her a necklace with a decapitated bat on it. She's told that she has to kill the KAtuu-infected people before it's too late. But it might also be too late for Angela whose blood is as cold as the lake and already seems to be infected. 

Angela buys a bunch of red meat and starts cooking steaks when Jim arrives to take her to the oil fields again. Despite everything so far, she's still insanely horny for him, especially since I guess she's also into dark and depraved stuff. But she also notices he's not the energetic and rambunctious boy she was with the previous night. He's more cold and serious, as if he knows he's already baptized her in the waters, so she's already in line to join him in whatever this plan is. So, despite every warning, and everything that's happened to her so far, of course she goes in the lake and makes out with Jim. They head to the lake house and almost do the deal, but she passes out and has a dream like she's arrived from some other planet and headed to Earth. Overtime, she ate and killed people before turning into a bat-like monster. When she wakes up, Jim eventually leaves.

The next day, Angela goes to talk with Professor Spark about his report on the meteor. He mentions that the article made him somewhat of an enemy at Point Lake, and his suggestions not to build the school by the lake made him more of an enemy. But he says that the stories of the illnesses are true and that thirty kids suffered from blurred vision, nausea, headaches and fainting among other ailments. We get an explanation about the magnetic rock affecting the water akin to living under power lines. A real "f'n magnets, how do they work" thing here. Maybe the ICP should have consulted Christopher Pike. In a more longform term, he says that while the water isn't magnetic itself, the exposure to the iron and the meteor has still affected it. 

Professor Spark also brings up that there is no life at all in the lake itself. No fish, no bugs, nothing. But there is a strange microorganism that he has seen, but doesn't know what it is. People knew about this, but since it was a fossilized organism, it couldn't possibly be dangerous. But that is more due to the other professors and scientists who won't even bother to investigate the water itself. He mentions that this isn't an isolated incident as another meteor crashed in Chile, and the lake there is referred to by the Ropans as Sentia, and they speak of a race called Kalair, which also turned those who were exposed to the lake into flesh eating monsters. So, it has similarities to the incident at Point Lake. 

Professor Spark also believes that the meteors and the Kalair/KAtuu may have come from the fifth planet. But not Jupiter. Instead he believes the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were remnants of a long destroyed planet. And that the meteors that formed the two lakes a hundred thousand years ago were from that destroyed planet. But despite the planet being dead, whatever was on those meteors was very much alive and overtime they managed to contaminate the water and infect whoever drinks from them. And of course when he tried to warn people, his enemies, particularly the ones who wanted to put the school up, called him crazy and discredited his work. Angela then believes that maybe the planet was magnetic, and that's why when the meteors crashed, they gave off strong magnetic energy. 

And that's when Angela finally feels like she believes what Mary's said, and about everything. That the water did affect the teens, that it did affect Jim. And maybe she should have let Mary kill him that night. She thanks Professor Spark for giving her some answers then makes her leave. As she goes to get something to eat, she learns that Mary had been let go on a half a million dollar bail. She heads to Mary's cabin but sees a body on the ground. Officer Jim Martin, one of the cops that stopped her that night, shot in the chest with a shotgun. But that's not all. She sees Mary's body hanging by a wire. She had committed suicide after killing the cop. Angela takes her body off the wire and then notices the blood on Mary's neck from the wire. She touches it, then tastes it, which gives her a rush of pleasure. Despite all this time trying to fight off the urges, she's starting to find herself compelled to cannibalism.

But before she can go further, Lieutenant Nguyen arrives. She also seems to have more confidence with her new form, so she tells him to stay away or he'll end up dead too. And she leaves without him following. But she's still hungry for blood, so when she returns home, she sees Plastic, the dog, and gets ready to feast before Jim arrives. He reveals that he was the one that made the note by her grandfather, who he had previously eaten. He also knows that she's now one of them and is ready to introduce her to all the others, and Angela is more than ready to meet them.

Despite the whole cold demeanor she's had, mixed with her own feelings for Jim, Angela still wants to finish the job, to kill the infected kids. So her plan is to lure them to the lake house for the party that Jim is going to hold that night, then blow the house up. She gets some five gallon bottles to fill with gasoline, then buys some ammunition, which gives off little red flags despite, you know, the murders a while back. I mean, this is set in America after all. She finally tries to deduce what the hell these monsters are. Ghouls? Aliens? Zombies? Vampires? Well, given the whole bat thing, maybe that's correct, but sunlight hasn't been an issue for any of them, so that too seems off. She fills up her gasoline bottles and places them in the basement before burying her grandfather's remains. She vows that she'll make sure they don't leave alive.

We cut to Nguyen who is with another officer named Kenny Williams. He's in the warehouse that Angela was in prior and sees the evidence of the dead bodies. He also believes that Jim was the one who murdered Officer Martin and then killed Mary and staged it as a suicide. He is also concerned about Angela, and still thinking of witnessing her tasting the blood, and her warning. He then learns that the mortician who worked on Todd Green and Kathy Barnes' bodies named Mr. Kane (Oh my god I wish it was Mr. Paul Bearer instead) needs to speak with him urgently.

The party begins and the teens arrive in Angela's lake house. Jim arrives, but with Kevin. Angela didn't factor that, since she had hoped to keep him safe from all this. She tries to get Kevin to leave when Jim attacks him and knocks him to the floor. Angela tries to run, but the others do the same to her, knocking her out as well. Nguyen meets with Mr. Kane who shows him two containers of blood that were drained from the two teens. However, the containers were empty as if someone drank them. But that's not all, the blood has a strange algae on it, as if it's contaminated. In another container is Mary's blood, and it seems that the contaminated blood is almost trying to hunt it.

Angela dreams of the alien planet and of its destruction by the men of the third planet. How they placed a giant bomb on the planet which blew it up, ultimately leading to the pieces that flew through space, including the two that landed on earth. She wakes up with Kevin in the basement. She reveals her plans and what the other teens are. She continues to plan her explosion as Kevin tries to stop her. She, for the first time actually feels attracted to Kevin and they kiss, with her biting him and tasting the blood. But, she also doesn't want him to suffer from the explosion, so she just up and breaks his neck before continuing to ready the explosion.

Nguyen heads to the cemetery and begins to unearth the corpse of Todd Green when he hears a moaning below. He realizes the worst. That Todd is still alive. That whatever Angela's planning might not actually work. Angela has let herself go fully at this point. She feasts on Kevin and her memories seem to fade around the time that Jim tells her that the meeting is about to start. She heads to her bedroom ands sees a picture of herself, Mary and Kevin, which snaps her back to herself. She continues to ready her plan, but also realizes she'll be killing Plastic the dog too. She puts on the KAtuu necklace which bothers Jim long enough for him to be distracted. She stabs him in the neck. As the others head to her room, she readies the gasoline and lights it ablaze. Soon the house explodes and she is sent flying from the house and into the lake. Lieutenant Nguyen shows up as the explosion happens. He realized that Angela did what she set out to do.

Three months after the explosion, Lieutenant Nguyen is at the remains of the lake house where Angela and thirty-two high schoolers died. And no sign of Angela's body. Since then he had decided to keep Plastic the dog since it managed to get out before the explosion. He actually came there one more time before he was to go to California. Everyone seems to be leaving Point after all of the tragedies. However, there's also stories about a man named Phillip Frazier who was filling his propane tanker when suddenly some creature attacked him. Then the creature blew up the oil factory. This caused the oil to spill into Point Lake, contaminating it and now making it even more undrinkable. 

Nguyen and Plastic then find the remains of a deer, as if some creature had killed it. They make their leave. Unbeknownst to Nguyen, Angela, or to be more specific, the creature Angela now has become, is watching him. She thinks to kill him, but remembers the necklace on her neck. A reminder not to kill humans. 

CONCLUSION

Monster is really good. And I think what makes it so good is that it subverts your expectation on what the story is actually about. From the cover, you expect that the focus will be on Jim and the other infected teens, but that's not really the case. Jim is the most notable antagonist, but the story's focus is on Angela. How she is the one changing after being contaminated by the water. Her struggle to keep from the urges, her mind drifting into dark thoughts, her becoming the titular monster. And credit to Christopher Pike, I think that was the best call for this book. It gives us an interesting protagonist to follow who isn't just trying to solve this mystery, but comes to the realization of what she's becoming and how quickly the shreds of her humanity disappear throughout the story. It makes her decisions make sense, including her lust for Jim which feels not just like her own sex drive speaking, but like an addiction in itself. The effects of the KAtuu in full swing.

I do think the book feels a bit slow in the middle, but that's really due to starting off so strong with Mary's rampage. It's a real shock to the system way to start the story. The book spins its wheels a bit in the middle as we try to explain the origins of the lake and the meteor. It gets a little redundant in places with the multiple explanations about the water and the alien lifeform that infects the bloodstream. But thankfully the rest of the book shines by again focusing on not just Angela's transformation, but the bits and pieces involving Lieutenant Nguyen trying to piece together the mystery himself. As for the other notable characters, Mary is good for our exposition character and Kevin is fine, though a bit of a creep in his own right. Feeling almost too possessive of Angela. Like because he's the good friend that she should be with him. Never to a horrible way, but still not the best look. Didn't deserve what happened to him though, honestly.

I also like the twist of sorts for the ending. How Angela appears to be the only survivor and has gone full monster. But has enough of her mind to ensure that this never happens again. That the cycle dies, at least in Point, by destroying the lake. And that she also may not remember why, but she knows not to feast on humans. It's a pretty sad ending, but it is also probably the best way this story could end. And sometimes the best endings are the darkest. 

So, given that this is my first Pike, it's time to compare his work with Stine's YA stuff that I've covered so far, that being Fear Street. Stine's not as good at building the mystery up until its important twist. He's also far more kid gloves when it comes to writing about death and gore, as well as most sexual acts. Pike clearly isn't. On the sexual part, Pike provides more scenes involving nudity, involving groping, involving passionate acts of making out and possible sex, though it's unclear if that happened given that Angela passed out. Did Jim rape her in her sleep? The book doesn't really say one way or the other on that. Stine tends to be more lighter on acts of infatuation that might lead to a steamy kiss or so. 

And Pike is way more fine with violence. We start the book with two kids being shot to death, we get scenes and stories of people being feasted upon, we get the rather dark demise of Mary and Officer Martin, and we get the literally explosive finale that kills 32 more people, I believe that includes what's left of Kevin after Angela feasted on him. So, if you count the seven people that Mary says were lured to their death at the warehouse, Angela's grandfather, Kevin, the kids at the meeting, Officer Martin, Mary, Todd and Kathy, that's roughly 43 dead people in this book. If you need your Y/A gore fix, this is definitely the book for you. Of the Fear Street I've read so far, most deaths are "off-screen" if you will, either in the events before the story, or to someone we're not made aware of. 

So, in conclusion, Monster is a recommend. It does have some redundancy midway, and I feel that Pike's explanation of the fifth planet doesn't feel as concise as it could have been. And the Native American stuff feels like stereotypes, but thankfully isn't as bad as it could have been. This could have been cleaned up a bit, maybe not needing to be 229 pages, but what we're left with still works for a compelling enough book and a strong way to enter Christopher Pike. It's not perfect, but it's definitely a monster read. Monster gets an A-.