Women in our 30s and 40s, perhaps we’d now reached the age where childhood obsessions naturally reemerge. There was no Pike, but I mentioned him to my friends, who immediately spun into nostalgia with me. Months ago, at a library warehouse store, I instinctively scanned the “P” section in fiction - muscle memory from my years of going for Pike books first. Occasionally I’d pick up Sati, his adult novel about a girl who thought she was God - but put the rest away with other childish things. Then, like the rest of Pike’s readers in the ’90s, I grew up. I knew little about the man whose words spurred my spiritual questions and the near-sex-scenes that kept my likewise nerdy friends passing his books around like precious contraband. I reread and reread his books, hunting for breadcrumbs about Pike himself. I not only loved Pike’s twisted universe, I wanted to grow into a version of him. My own notebooks overran with dark tales as I attempted to leap from obsessive reader to writer. At school, they sat atop my Trapper Keeper and then accompanied me to bed each night, a reminder that ghosts, gods, and monsters lurked outside my door. Death hung over those books, like a Ouija board at a drinking party, a mashup of teen mortality and fun. My adolescence was the standard tragi-teen state, but it was illuminated by the neon splash of Christopher Pike titles.
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