While Christopher Pike was a horror writer, a thread of esoteric spirituality winds through many of his works. While most of the kids have assorted cancer diagnoses, Spence–the lone gay character in the original novel, although not the only one in the Netflix show–is dying of AIDS.

In the show as in the novel, a group of young people living out their final days in hospice care meet every night at the eponymous hour to tell each other stories. Spence is one of five terminally ill teenagers in The Midnight Club, a book you’ve probably heard of now, if you didn’t read it as a fifth-grader in the ‘90s, because Mike Flanagan made it into a Netflix series. I remember looking up “herpes” in the dictionary after reading Gimme a Kiss. Like Fear Street, the details of Pike’s books blur in my memory, but I remember the hammer in The Wicked Heart I remember (because it made me blush) a sex scene from The Last Vampire.

But Pike was gorier than Stine, and also much sexier. Pike’s books were aesthetically familiar: neon-scrawled titles, gasping blondes menaced by skeletal figures. These stories both frightened me and filled me with a strange, giggly delight, a feeling I’d recognize in later years when I was finally tall enough to go on the good roller coasters.Īfter exhausting the Stine catalogue, the next step was Christopher Pike. I couldn’t, today, describe for you the plot of a single Fear Street book, but certain images have stayed fresh in my mind: a skull with a two-headed snake inside, a locker-room shower hot enough to scald flesh. Stine piled between us, so whoever finished her book could simply throw it back and grab a fresh one. One of my happiest memories is of a school read-in, when the girls in my class sat in a circle on the floor with what seemed to be the complete works of R.L. I was a pulp horror fan as far back as I can remember.

The midnight club christopher pike