Mancandy Monday: Christopher Pike

I'm pretty sure Christopher Pike isn't real. He's, like, a total recluse and no-one ever sees him and there's only one picture of him in existence:

Probably because when you try to take his picture, the camera melts. He's an alien space vampire. He's really a woman called Catherine, and his publisher just told him to pretend to be a man because he used to write the most gory, grown-up horror stories for young adults and they didn't think people could take a woman writing that shit. Seriously, they outdid Stephen King for scary nastiness.

But his books were also beautiful. There are times when I remember haunting scenes from literary masterworks, like that bit in Jane Eyre with the tree, and that bit in The Handmaid's Tale when she finds the scratched words at the back of the wardrobe. But maybe I'm just plebian because I remember bits from Christopher Pike's books just as hard.

I remember the end of that one where that lad plays this game, and the only way to win is to not launch a single bomb. I remember the needle in Whisper of Death and the lake in Monster and the mines in The Hollow Skull. He always had creepy abandoned mines in his stories, but somehow his creepy abandoned mines were so much creepier and darker and colder than other horror writers, and their abandoned mines.

I really believed I could go down there, and come out as a different, evil, possibly possessed by space alien vampires person. That was the power of Christopher Pike. His stories haunt me in a way I find hard to explain, and I always find little bits of my stories being inspired by his work. A drowning girl here, a person acting weird there...

Even weirder, I used to dream about marrying him. I'd grow up and be a famous author, naturally, and buy a beach house, because my stupid thirteen year old self had heard he lived near a beach even though it's now obvious that he lives on Mars or in Narnia or some other magical made-up place brilliant enough to contain him. And then one day, he'd be jogging on the beach even though he's a space vampire and I doubt they can jog in the dawn light but anyways. He jogs, and then he sees me on my porch even though I never sit outside, and we fall instantly in love.

Of course it later turns out that he's possessed by black goo from an abandoned mine or evol lake, and he tries to eat me like a hamburger or murder me inside a car filling up with carbon monoxide or by pushing me off a cliff or hurling me out onto the surface of Mars. But what kind of shit would I give, by that point? I got to be married to Christopher Pike, even though he doesn't actually exist!