Hey, I'm Mick! I'm an Aussie fan of Christopher Pike's from way back.
If you're here and you aren't a lost Trekkie, you probably read a lot of YA horror fiction during that genre's 90s heyday, yeah? Me too.
Your humble webmaster was born in '77, so I was around 12 or 13 when the genre really got cooking. I was into Point Thrillers as they were known in Australia (Point Horror in the US), and Pike hit my radar at the same time as those books.
I think the first Pike I read was Slumber Party or Chain Letter--they crossed my shelves simultaneously. I particularly loved Chain Letter, especially its UK cover. The artist was Paul Davies, the same guy who painted Stephen King's UK covers in that period, and Pike's name on the cover was in the same silver embossed font as King's was on his. So these Pike books were clearly for more grown up teens, I deduced. And to read Pike's books--high schoolers driving cars, teens drinking, cheerleaders killing their classmates, all written in a somewhat lugubrious voice--well, we were clearly in terrirory a little more hardcore than Point Thrillers, weren't we? PEOPLE GOT TIED TO BEDS AND FORCED TO SNORT COKE, FOR GOD'S SAKE.
I've been a writer myself since before I started school, and Pike quickly became my new literary hero. He remains one of my biggest influences, decades later.
I got into web design in the early 2000s, and there were already a lot of Pike-related blogs and forums, so I never did build a Pike site. But as times goes on, I notice those blogs go abandoned, and there's never really been a central hub for Pike-related news and info, y'know? And with the recent announcment of a Midnight Club TV series on Netflix... Well, someone's gotta do it.
ChristopherPikeBooks.com isn't intended to compete with the other Pike sites, but rather to act as a kind of news hub for all the various Pike stuff out there. I'll be posting links to news, podcasts, blogs, anything relevant to the man and his work. If you've got something I should see, hit me up!
Another little thing that might qualify me as the guy who ought to run this site: I seem to be the only man on Earth who remembers seeing Christopher Pike interviewed on television, around 1992. Kind of a point of pride with me. I anticipate mentioning it often.
We're a bit bare bones for now, and part of me wanted to fill the site with book summaries and such before launch, but screw it. Now or never. Go big or Die Softly, amiright?
-Mick
8 February 2021
