Pike throwback
Jan. 16th, 2017 09:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
impyThanks to tanz_fanatika, I fell down the Christopher Pike nostalgia hole again. Technically I'd already sort of fallen because I found one of my copies of Fall Into Darkness and was re-reading it while waiting for my Kindle to charge but still.
Sooooooo... I went with Spellbound next as it was the book I remembered younger me staying up and wondering what if? after I read it the first time. I also remember a fair amount of the plot, including the twist.
I mean, the book is pretty friggin' old at this point but hey, spoiler cuts are just polite, right? Anyway, I think the book held up fairly well all things considered. You could argue that cellphones wouldn't make too much of a difference in this since the falls could very well be a place with no reception and that's the location of about half the book. :P Bala being literally the magical black man is probably not the best thing ever, but it wasn't the best thing ever then and... enh?
I think my only problem with re-reading it is that Joni is just so obviously off that I find it very difficult that anyone who ever tried to carry on a conversation with her would actually be attracted to her beyond, say, Ray's level of attraction. Ray admits that Joni's pretty but he'd really like to get back with Pam, his ex, but that he feels sort of like Joni's put a spell on him and he has to see it through. Everyone else? Like... really? This girl is weird enough that not even her exceptional beauty should overcome it once you talk to her for five seconds.
On the other hand, we only meet Joni after she's pretty close to burning day (yes, why not make a HP ref) and she does seem a bit more animated after she's fed. Of course, she's actually even more weird the more she talks so really, I'm not sure I'd buy that.
I'd forgotten that Joni lets Alex go (right over the falls, but still) and that this is why Cindy keeps Sybil around. I'd also forgotten that at the end Cindy wonders how good an idea this is, giving us a bit of a cliffhanger but not too much of one to make you feel cheated.
So yes, while Ari was traumatized by Whisper of Death and Cass I think had issues with Road to Nowhere, Spellbound was the Pike book to make me stop and think. Also, vultures, man. Vultures. Nyargh.
Overall? Not a bad re-read. Oh, and if we're playing "spot the Pike within a Pike reference" game, it's Karen and Jason going to see The Blind Mirror.
Since that went so well, I asked the bookcase to suggest another, preferably not one of the series since I didn't want to read multiples last night, and it coughed up See You Later. Unrelated to the actual story, I'm going to assume this is one That Bitch Penny* walked away with and that I had to replace because I'm pretty sure I'd never have let my copy get down to two corners ripped off. So this probably came from a Take A Book, Leave A Book thing or maybe the quarter bin at the Book Exchange.
SYL is one I remembered parts of very well and then the rest I either mashed together with another book or remembered wrong entirely, so that was a fun re-read.
Pike within a Pike: Mark's game is called The Starlight Crystal. Chaneen is indeed the Queen of the Universe.
SYL actually made me cry when I was reading it last night, which was a bit unexpected. I remembered that it's a time travel story that goes straight to hell when Kara, a traveler, gets a little too enthusiastic about changing her past. I just didn't remember how long that takes to happen and how short a time frame we're talking for this book as a whole. We really only check in for maybe six days, and only three are really fleshed out beyond "and then I played Vincent's game and wondered for the four billionth time what, exactly, he was trying to accomplish."
I remembered that Becky died and that Vincent died, and that Ray shot one of the girls, but everything else about the really bad night was mixed up with something else entirely. It'll be interesting to see if it's another Pike book (maybe one that mentions SYL?) or if my brain just went completely off the rails.
Anyway, the book itself works really well until it meets the epilogue and time travel manages to claim yet another victim. Usually your time travelers cannot interact with themselves in the past, but that's not the case in SYL. Weird things happen when they get too close physically, but the world doesn't end (yet...ha!) and changing little things doesn't immediately send the future travelers into dust. Which is refreshing, honestly, but then you get to the epilogue as Mark's dying and you're just left wondering WTF.
It's been pretty obvious that Vincent was one of the Illumni (did I get that right?) because he wasn't around when WWIII came about, but if there was no time machine how did Kara and Fred manage to hurtle back in time enough to actually have any effect on anything? How? In the future Kara came back to prevent from happening, it's more like Kara and Vincent are figments of Mark's dreaming mind and that I can accept, but considering Kara kills Becky and it sticks, there's actual travel involved. Brain goes splodey.
Finally, the only way to win the game is not to play continues to be one of my favorite things.
*TBP - I've mentioned my dislike of TBP quite a few times but in this context it's because in high school, she used her friendship with Ari to get me to loan her quite a few Pike books. Which meant I had to come to school early, carrying quite a bit of precious cargo (books are my babies), and I never saw them again. If memory serves, I think I found one or two in the Book Exchange years later but yeah. TBP decimated my Pike collection and then acted as if she had no idea what I was talking about and that nope, those were totally her books or I was crazy, she'd never borrowed anything from me. Much, much later she'd also wind up owing me like $300 on top of that, sleeping with Ari's uncle, trying to screw Ari's then boyfriend while trying to break them up for years later, and then just not bothering to visit Ari ever after she got sick. TBP is her official name and we use it so as not to make any other Penny feel we are cursing them.
tanz_fanatika, I fell down the Christopher Pike nostalgia hole again. Technically I'd already sort of fallen because I found one of my copies of Fall Into Darkness and was re-reading it while waiting for my Kindle to charge but still.Sooooooo... I went with Spellbound next as it was the book I remembered younger me staying up and wondering what if? after I read it the first time. I also remember a fair amount of the plot, including the twist.
I mean, the book is pretty friggin' old at this point but hey, spoiler cuts are just polite, right? Anyway, I think the book held up fairly well all things considered. You could argue that cellphones wouldn't make too much of a difference in this since the falls could very well be a place with no reception and that's the location of about half the book. :P Bala being literally the magical black man is probably not the best thing ever, but it wasn't the best thing ever then and... enh?
I think my only problem with re-reading it is that Joni is just so obviously off that I find it very difficult that anyone who ever tried to carry on a conversation with her would actually be attracted to her beyond, say, Ray's level of attraction. Ray admits that Joni's pretty but he'd really like to get back with Pam, his ex, but that he feels sort of like Joni's put a spell on him and he has to see it through. Everyone else? Like... really? This girl is weird enough that not even her exceptional beauty should overcome it once you talk to her for five seconds.
On the other hand, we only meet Joni after she's pretty close to burning day (yes, why not make a HP ref) and she does seem a bit more animated after she's fed. Of course, she's actually even more weird the more she talks so really, I'm not sure I'd buy that.
I'd forgotten that Joni lets Alex go (right over the falls, but still) and that this is why Cindy keeps Sybil around. I'd also forgotten that at the end Cindy wonders how good an idea this is, giving us a bit of a cliffhanger but not too much of one to make you feel cheated.
So yes, while Ari was traumatized by Whisper of Death and Cass I think had issues with Road to Nowhere, Spellbound was the Pike book to make me stop and think. Also, vultures, man. Vultures. Nyargh.
Overall? Not a bad re-read. Oh, and if we're playing "spot the Pike within a Pike reference" game, it's Karen and Jason going to see The Blind Mirror.
Since that went so well, I asked the bookcase to suggest another, preferably not one of the series since I didn't want to read multiples last night, and it coughed up See You Later. Unrelated to the actual story, I'm going to assume this is one That Bitch Penny* walked away with and that I had to replace because I'm pretty sure I'd never have let my copy get down to two corners ripped off. So this probably came from a Take A Book, Leave A Book thing or maybe the quarter bin at the Book Exchange.
SYL is one I remembered parts of very well and then the rest I either mashed together with another book or remembered wrong entirely, so that was a fun re-read.
Pike within a Pike: Mark's game is called The Starlight Crystal. Chaneen is indeed the Queen of the Universe.
SYL actually made me cry when I was reading it last night, which was a bit unexpected. I remembered that it's a time travel story that goes straight to hell when Kara, a traveler, gets a little too enthusiastic about changing her past. I just didn't remember how long that takes to happen and how short a time frame we're talking for this book as a whole. We really only check in for maybe six days, and only three are really fleshed out beyond "and then I played Vincent's game and wondered for the four billionth time what, exactly, he was trying to accomplish."
I remembered that Becky died and that Vincent died, and that Ray shot one of the girls, but everything else about the really bad night was mixed up with something else entirely. It'll be interesting to see if it's another Pike book (maybe one that mentions SYL?) or if my brain just went completely off the rails.
Anyway, the book itself works really well until it meets the epilogue and time travel manages to claim yet another victim. Usually your time travelers cannot interact with themselves in the past, but that's not the case in SYL. Weird things happen when they get too close physically, but the world doesn't end (yet...ha!) and changing little things doesn't immediately send the future travelers into dust. Which is refreshing, honestly, but then you get to the epilogue as Mark's dying and you're just left wondering WTF.
It's been pretty obvious that Vincent was one of the Illumni (did I get that right?) because he wasn't around when WWIII came about, but if there was no time machine how did Kara and Fred manage to hurtle back in time enough to actually have any effect on anything? How? In the future Kara came back to prevent from happening, it's more like Kara and Vincent are figments of Mark's dreaming mind and that I can accept, but considering Kara kills Becky and it sticks, there's actual travel involved. Brain goes splodey.
Finally, the only way to win the game is not to play continues to be one of my favorite things.
*TBP - I've mentioned my dislike of TBP quite a few times but in this context it's because in high school, she used her friendship with Ari to get me to loan her quite a few Pike books. Which meant I had to come to school early, carrying quite a bit of precious cargo (books are my babies), and I never saw them again. If memory serves, I think I found one or two in the Book Exchange years later but yeah. TBP decimated my Pike collection and then acted as if she had no idea what I was talking about and that nope, those were totally her books or I was crazy, she'd never borrowed anything from me. Much, much later she'd also wind up owing me like $300 on top of that, sleeping with Ari's uncle, trying to screw Ari's then boyfriend while trying to break them up for years later, and then just not bothering to visit Ari ever after she got sick. TBP is her official name and we use it so as not to make any other Penny feel we are cursing them.
