Christopher Pike

Christopher Pike is an American author of, primarily, teen thriller and horror titles. He was most popular in the 1980s and 1990s, moving on to publishing adult works in the 2000s. "Christopher Pike" is the pseudonym of Kevin McFadden, born November 12, 1954.

Not to be confused with the Star Trek character, although that's where he got the name.


 * Witch
 * The Last Vampire


 * Alas, Poor Villain:
 * Alone with the Psycho: In the novel Falling, FBI agent Kelly Feinman thinks she has tracked down the Acid Man serial killer,
 * Alpha Bitch: Lena Carlton in Weekend, though she turns out to be a Lovable Alpha Bitch.
 * Anti-Villain: Mary Blanc in Monster. She murders three people with a shotgun and intended to kill more at a party. Mary does this because she knew that the three in question were transforming into inhuman monsters that devour human flesh, and had already killed a small group of people before the book began. Crosses into Idiot Ball territory when you realize Mary could've just waited until they were alone instead of killing them in front of dozens of witnesses.
 * Arc Words: The term starlight crystal is the title of one of Pike's novels (but it isn't used anywhere in story), the title of a story in the last Remember Me book, and is a term Sati uses to describe herself as in Sati.
 * Author Appeal: Big breast fascination. An interesting point, however, is that the main characters of his novels commonly have small frames and they mock the larger breasted secondary characters.
 * Badass: Sita, protagonist of The Last Vampire series, routinely slaughters small armies single-handedly, with anything from her personal collection of assault weapons to her bare hands.
 * However, as the series goes on Sita's Badass-ness gets a tad silly. What use is a character who can take on anything and brags about it endlessly?
 * The Bad Guy Wins:.
 * Balance Between Good and Evil: The Last Vampire series explains that God created evil, because without it people were complacent and couldn't become truly good.
 * Big Damn Heroes: Bert in Weekend,
 * Bittersweet Ending: Monster.
 * This is actually a reoccurring trend in Pike's books. Usually, the heroine will wind up dying or suffering A Fate Worse Than Death to achieve some greater good.
 * Bring My Red Jacket: Occurs in Witch. Julia has a vision of Doesn't fate suck?
 * Brought Down to Normal: An ancient Greek goddess in The Immortal and her Arch Enemy are turned mortal as a punishment, who gain Past Life Memories as a result.
 * Brother-Sister Incest: Shari's brother and  in Remember Me. In 's defense, the fact she and her brother did not grow up together would have overridden the aversion to incest which would normally have developed. Even so, she still knew him, was close to him, and pursued the relationship even after she learned of the incest, not to mention the whole disturbing If I Can't Have You, Together in Death plot she pursues, so the Squick remains. Also an example of Surprise Incest on the part of Shari's brother.
 * Chivalrous Pervert: A favourite of Pike's in his novels: the Final Friends series (Bubba); Monster (Kevin); Witch (Randy); The Eternal Enemy (Ed).
 * Clingy MacGuffin: In the Chain Letter books, the titular chain letter. Once the letter is sent to you and you are on the list, the only way to free yourself from eternally being commanded to perform tasks (each task progressively becoming more malicious and difficult) is death.
 * Covers Always Lie: The Starlight Crystal features the cover image of a giant silver hourglass, decorated with jewels in a rainbow pattern, containing skulls and bones that turn into stars in its bottom half. No such hourglass appears anywhere in the story. In fact, the term "starlight crystal" isn't used anywhere at all in the book.
 * Defrosting Ice Queen: Julia's aunt in Witch is presented as a very cold and stern woman, very unlike Julia's mother. By the end of the novel, she's softened considerably.
 * Doomed Protagonist: The Midnight Club. That's sort of the point, as the main characters are all teenagers with incurable diseases living in a hospice.
 * Dream Land: Seen multiple times in Remember Me when Shari attempts to invade the dreams of her friends so as to find out which one of them killed her. Also, the moment when she saves her brother's life, which she had dreamed about beforehand.
 * Dream Within a Dream: Magic Fire
 * Evil Is Sexy: One of the antagonist vampires in The Last Vampire series has a face full of acne scars.
 * Express Delivery: Occurs in The Grave and The Last Vampire 4: Phantom.
 * Faking the Dead: Falling,, Weekend  , Gimme a Kiss  , Fall Into Darkness.
 * Fetus Terrible: The Grave was about a young woman who is impregnated by one of The Undead and killed by being dumped in a freezer. She becomes one of the undead herself and it is revealed that the fetus she is carrying  Oh, and this book was aimed at teenagers. Really.
 * See also The Cold One.
 * Gone Horribly Right: Gimme A Kiss.
 * Gone Horribly Wrong: Weekend.
 * Good Scars, Evil Scars: Used in Slumber Party.
 * Grand Theft Me:  and   use this trope as a twist - without the transferred soul initially remembering their true identity.
 * In Spellbound,
 * Hannibal Lecture: in Falling  Pike has stated he owes a debt to Silence of the Lambs, and even a character in Falling name-checks Hannibal Lecter.
 * Hope Spot: The Eternal Enemy.
 * Ill Girl: Robin in Weekend, most of the female characters in The Midnight Club.
 * Lotus Eater Machine: Magic Fire
 * Love Makes You Evil: Last Act.
 * Also Remember Me.
 * Moral Event Horizon: Chain Letter 2 is all about invoking this trope. Each of the protagonists is given a task to complete which will push them over the horizon. If the task is not completed, the character in question will be killed, effectively giving each of them the choice between death and damnation. The tasks given ranged from the truly horrific to the What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous??.
 * This Troper actually read that book as a child, believe it or not! It wasn't so much about "eternal damnation" in the usual sense as it was about what would be personally damning to each person who had to complete the task. Kip's task was to, but this would be personally damning because   Meanwhile,
 * The Movie: Fall Into Darkness was adapted into a made-for-TV movie.
 * Near-Death Clairvoyance: Killed at a party, Shari Cooper spends the remainder of Remember Me as a ghost, watching over friends/family and trying to figure out who murdered her.
 * Oh Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us: Used in Master of Murder. An author names his characters after his friends, and then the fanfics become canon (i.e., they happen in Real Life). Hilarity doesn't exactly ensue, being a Pike novel.
 * Used again in Whisper of Death, when the main characters discover that a dead classmate had written stories about them using different names, and each one dies as the characters in the story.
 * Our Vampires Are Different: In The Last Vampire series, old vampires (5000 years or so) can walk about in sunlight; they don't have fangs and must manually cut open a vein in order to drink blood; and Alisa/Sita in particular can
 * In The Season of Passage and Monster the
 * Out-Gambitted: Used in Weekend.
 * Playing with Fire: Lara in Slumber Party starts to believe that someone in their group is either a pyrokinetic, or it's the case of spontaneous combustion, in order to explain how these fires keep occurring.
 * Magic Fire, obviously.
 * Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Shari's dream about her brother and the balloon in Remember Me. Which, naturally, she doesn't find out what it really means until the moment it becomes relevant.
 * Really 700 Years Old: The crews of The Traveler and The Pandora in The Starlight Crystal, by means of traveling at the speed of light and cryogenic freezing respectively, live so long into the future that the Earth is rendered a lifeless, radioactive wasteland, and by the time they return the radiation has since abated.
 * This is a subversion, though, as the reason the crew of The Traveler remains so young isn't because of extended immortality, but because of how fast the ship is travelling, they don't age inside at the same rate as the universe outside is. A week to those in the ship is really two hundred years outside.
 * Reasonable Authority Figure: In both Last Act and Monster.
 * Recycled Script: Weekend and Slumber Party are both about a group of friends spending the weekend in some isolated location, and both groups share a dark secret from their past involving a former friend who was badly injured. The villain of the book is revealed to be someone out for revenge.
 * Red Pill, Blue Pill: In Magic Fire there is
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In Witch. Julia's heart and mind are clouded by thoughts of revenge after Scott is gravely injured.
 * Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Not prophecy per say, but the events that occur in The Starlight Crystal are revealed to have been set up by none other than
 * Self-Serving Memory: In Last Act.
 * Set Right What Once Was Wrong: See You Later and The Eternal Enemy.
 * Shadow Archetype: Literally, with Shari and the Shadow in Remember Me. Also a rare example where, despite the initial fear and horror, it turns out to be a positive thing and there is a merger.
 * Significant Anagram: Last Act features
 * Soft Water: Subverted in The Last Vampire series. When someone gets thrown off a 10-story(ish) building into a deep swimming pool, they die. Effectively being pulpified in fact. The thrower, apparently finding this amusing, proceeds to get rid of all her opposition in the same way. The main character only survives because she's a vampire, though she's still very badly injured.
 * Story Within a Story: Used numerous times in some of Pike's novels. Weekend, The Midnight Club, Whisper of Death, Remember Me 3, Master of Murder, and Road to Nowhere.
 * Suetiful All Along:
 * Switched At Birth:
 * Thanatos Gambit: Fall in Darkness.
 * Unfortunate Implications: In both The Midnight Club and Sati, Pike has written two homosexual males who die of AIDS.
 * Flynn's actions in Weekend. He hides his identity partly so he can decide whether or not Robin deserves a kidney. If you analyse this at all it's pretty horrible to insinuate yourself into a relative's life so you can pass judgement on whether or not they deserve to die young.
 * Vampire Fiction: The Last Vampire series.
 * Vegetarian Vampire: In The Last Vampire series Alisa/Sita will drink the blood of people she has to kill because, well, why let it go to waste? But, she has the power to control people and wipe their memories, and will avoid killing them if possible - drinking only some of their blood, then wiping their memory. In Monster most
 * What the Hell, Hero?: While she never gets called on it, Ilonka in The Midnight Club breaks up Kevin and his girlfriend Kathy by making it clear to her that Kevin is in a hospice, not a hospital, and is not going to get better. The girl leaves the hospice in tears without seeing Kevin. In all honesty, this was out of wanting Kevin for herself.
 * Who Dunnit to Me?: In Remember Me, Shari begins the novel already dead. She was killed at a party, and being a ghost she must figure out which one of her friends killed her.
 * Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Rela in The Eternal Enemy.
 * Xanatos Gambit: Fall Into Darkness.
 * Your Vampires Suck: In The Last Vampire Sita possesses few of the traditional weaknesses. She sometimes has the "what about crosses, garlic, running water, coffin?" conversation with humans she reveals herself to. She can even stand the sunlight, though she explains she couldn't really do this until she'd aged a few THOUSAND years. Vampires in this series were first created when a demon (a yakshini) was summoned and possessed the corpse of a baby who was still inside its dead mother's womb.
 * Your Vampires Suck: In The Last Vampire Sita possesses few of the traditional weaknesses. She sometimes has the "what about crosses, garlic, running water, coffin?" conversation with humans she reveals herself to. She can even stand the sunlight, though she explains she couldn't really do this until she'd aged a few THOUSAND years. Vampires in this series were first created when a demon (a yakshini) was summoned and possessed the corpse of a baby who was still inside its dead mother's womb.