Reading all of Christopher Pike's books in 2018

responding to old asks i forgot about

I think this book was written in the 80's.

The two main characters were identical adult female twins, probably in their mid-twenties They have red/auburn hair I remember a scene where they become the mirror of one another and inadvertently open a door into some kind of parallel universe There was a scene where they say crossed legged across from one another and went into a sort of hypnotic state staring into each other's eyes and that triggered the "door" to the parallel world. One of them became a reptilian, or was possessed by one.

I'm pretty sure you're talking about The Visitor!

I started answering this a while ago, and then mindlessly navigated away from the page and lost like twenty minutes of work. It was so frustrating that I abandoned the question, trying to give myself space and time that I wanted to invest again.

Because this is a great question. I actually meant to consider this in a sort of wrap-up post, with a summary and personal reflection. But after close to 100 stories I was so burned out on Pike that I wasn't in any place to think about it. (Kind of the same as what happened with the first version of this response.)

So four years later, here's my bests and worsts of the whole experience.

My top 5 favorites

See You Later. A heartfelt love story that unlocks all the feels. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I can't help myself with this one.

Master of Murder. More nostalgia, but it actually is genuinely clever, making the suspense novelist figure out the crime he's been subconsciously reporting for a year.

Monster. Dude, I knew I liked this and was creeped out by it back in the day, but I did not remember how tight and how chilling this story was. Maybe his actual best.

Whisper of Death. Creepy and delightful. Character motivations work, activities and actions and repercussions work, and even the sense of "wrong place, wrong time" feels right.

Die Softly. This book is fucked, but in a good way. I love how we're rooting for one thing and slowly come to realize it's all wrong.

other good ones

Bury Me Deep. A tight story with minimal characters and set. Believable and not overused.

Remember Me. It's a classic and a best-seller for a reason. Just … like, ignore the sequels.

Last Act. Even though I don't love the "ladies be crazy" conceit, this is a solid suspense mystery that we actually have a chance to unravel.

Weekend. Yeah, I like the mysteries. This one is realistic in characters and actions. And yeah, admittedly, I have a soft spot for my first Pike book.

pleasant surprises

Execution of Innocence. I don't know if it actually aged well, what with the crazy-gay trope, but I was grateful for the realistic crime story.

Gimme a Kiss. I remembered this one being simplistic and uninteresting. Maybe because I was a dumb kid. As an old man, I appreciated the thoughtful plot and agency of the female characters.

The Visitor. The first time around, I was mad at how short this book was. The reread revealed that it had exactly as much as it needed.

Spooksville in general. I hadn't read these before, and was expecting disconnected slime monster horror. It was nice to stick with one group of kids and one setting, even if the "scares" were diverse.

unpleasant surprises

The Lost Mind. I remembered this one being such a great story with a killer structure and an amazing twist, and was really bugged when, upon reread, I discovered it had a MASSIVE plot and character hole.

Falling. It was creepy in a good way the first time I read it, but coming back to it made it creepy in a bad way. Also, all his strong female agency in the good books goes out the window in this one.

The Star Group. One I loved at the time, with the whole idea of high school friend groups forever until we die, but upon reread the death wasn't actually a payoff.

books that don't include enough

Magic Fire. We needed more backstory, particularly on the love interest, since she was the whole reason for the story happening and we just plain don't know why.

The Tachyon Web. More about the characters (not to mention societies and interstellar politics) would have made this a deeper and more satisfying story.

The Grave. It has a lot of promise, but there's not enough about how they end up where they are and what might happen next or what it means. Seemed like he tried again with Witch World, which is ... sort of better? But still not great.

bottom 5

(tumblr won't let me do a numbered list in reverse)

5. Chain Letter 2. Throwing away a thoughtful portrayal of a kid with cancer-induced mental illness in order to move some books on the power of Satanic Panic.

4. Black Knight. It's The Hunger Games, except … not good.

3. The Wicked Heart. I can't with the fuckin' Hitler, Kevin.

2. Witch. I can't tell if nobody cares or if everyone cares too much. Either way, it sucks.

Simon Pulse, 2015 413 pages, 19 chapters + epilogue ISBN 978-1-4814-5058-4 LOC: PZ7.P626St 2015 OCLC: 936552329 Released November 17, 2015 (per B&N)

There’s a new girl in school, and something about her is unbelievably interesting to Fred Allen. Maybe it’s the way she carries herself. Maybe it’s the way she refers to herself as merely a vessel for conveying the knowledge she seems to have about our greater nature. Maybe it’s the remarkable power she commands, the way that happiness and healing ride in her wake everywhere she goes. Or maybe it’s her sweet ass. Whatever it is, she seems to connect with Fred just as quickly, elevating him to a greater happiness than he’s ever known. Of course, as with any powerful girl that people don’t understand, this happiness is fated to flee just as quickly when she pushes herself beyond what her body can handle.

Or, shorter: It’s Sati. It’s Sati set in high school with teenagers. It’s Sateen.

Part of the reason I took on this project is that I felt like my own writing was stagnating. Time was I couldn’t sit down without pumping out a thousand words of my own universe, my own characters and plots and desires and ideas. But at a certain point, I started to try to focus on bettering and refining one of my main tales, one I’d revisited off and on since sixth grade ... and I just burned out. I realized that I simply could not rework this story again, that it wasn’t ever going to be what I wanted or do what I wanted, or at least not in this fifth attempt in ten years. I couldn’t keep talking about the same thing again.

This might be indicative of why I’ve had a hard time pushing through as A Year (And A Half Now, Almost) Of Pike has approached its end point. There’s no denying that the man is a killer storyteller, and that some of his ideas and worlds were stunning and even revolutionary within the genre. But thirty years is a long time to stay in the game, especially when you’re pumping out more than three books a year for the main part of your popularity. It’s admirable that he was able to keep that up for so long without resorting to the James Patterson model of hiring someone else to write the books that have his name in large type across the top. But then, when you’ve only got one brain working on all these extensive ideas and under these onerous deadlines, you’re invariably going to start to repeat yourself. 

Almost everything Pike wrote after the start of Spooksville (I can’t even be charitable and say after his car accident) has repeated or revisited some major theme from an earlier work (mostly his own; I see you, Black Knight). And as I’ve pushed through and read every single one of his published works, I’ve started to feel that same fatigue that I had when trying to rewrite and repair something I’d spent so much time on of my own. See, this is why I can never actually be an academic despite being a composition teacher: so much of studying English is finding your niche and continuing to write about the same topic for your entire career, and I don’t think I could ever devote that much of my professional life to writing about the same thing. I just got tired of my ill-researched writing about the complete works of my favorite childhood author, for fuck’s sake. 

Still, if any book was due a revamp, Sati fits that mold. It was his first adult novel, it kinda got buried to all except his most devoted fans, and maybe it would be timely to publish a book about kindness and introspection and acceptance just as the muckrakingest American election in recent history was getting underway. But most of all, it’s still a relevant look at how we act and what we think about when we consider faith and religion and God. Considering how audiences and the book market have so drastically changed in the last thirty years, it totally makes sense that Pike might want to revisit the concept for a new generation. And honestly, I’m a victim of my own age and literacy here — nobody else who might be interested in this YA book in 2015 is reading its spiritual predecessor from 1988.

I’m mostly going to blast through the summary, because it’s been more than three weeks since I finished the book and I don’t actually want to reread it to remember specifics. Fred is a high-school musician living in Elder, South Dakota, and just like any other teenager in a small town is dreaming of escape. His parents own a hardware store and just barely maintain a rocky marriage, though all we know about that is what Fred specifically tells us. His best friend Janet, the presumptive valedictorian, has her own messy home life, but they always have each other’s backs, which is why Janet pushes Fred toward the new girl.

This is Aja, a beautiful Brazilian who relocated to South Dakota for some reason three months ago but didn’t start school until today. The teacher in the class they share is unreasonably mean to her for apparently no reason, but it doesn’t put Fred off buying her lunch and trying to learn more about her. He’s unsuccessful, largely, but she does learn about him and his band and their work before she takes off. They’re doing a gig at a nearby Air Force bar on the weekend, and everyone knows Fred is the real talent and pressures him to perform a little more of his original and quieter work at the show. This here is Fred’s difficulty: he wants it, he has the talent and the drive, but he second-guesses how much people actually want to hear his voice.

Aja gets kicked out of the class they share when she’s accused of cheating on her entrance exam (what?), so Fred doesn’t see her again until after their gig. The crowd is getting raucous and angry, and the drummer doesn’t take well to that, so the evening is just starting to devolve into a brawl when Aja stands on a table and tells everyone to calm the fuck down. She also helps out one of the servicemen, who has taken a whiskey bottle to the head but now isn’t even bleeding. Weird, right? 

A local reporter sure thinks so. She posts a video of the event, with a suggestion that maybe Aja is more than she appears to be. Can she heal people? The folks at their next gig have the same question, surrounding her and generally pestering until Fred manages to pull her away. They drop her off at home, the biggest house in town, and Fred finally asks her out, sort of, by responding to her question about his unhappiness by saying she should stop accepting dates with other dudes. Like, possessive much already? But on his way to work the next day, he sees the teacher in the cemetery, near her son’s grave, and decides to talk to her about Aja. This opens a floodgate: the teacher blames herself for her son running outside and getting hit by a car, and apparently Aja knew more than she should have, which was why the teacher was so salty with her before. So what else does this girl know?

Fred goes to pick Aja up for their first official date, and ends up talking to her guardian, where he finally learns more about her past. It seems that Aja was a feral child living near a village in the Amazon, and she had a reputation as a magical healer and talent. The guardian was compelled to the village for some reason, and appointed herself the caretaker of the girl, and only uprooted them to South Dakota because Aja said they needed to go there. The guardian only has a vague idea why, but she’s pretty sure it’s related to Fred.

They go back to his house, because his parents are out, and he plays her a song almost off the top of his head that she’s inspired. Before they can start gettin’ freaky, Fred’s phone rings, and apparently his hot-headed drummer has gotten into it with some drug dealers and cops in a nearby town and is in critical condition in the hospital. So Fred and Aja go there, but when he calls the guardian’s valet (or whatever this dude is; it’s kinda muddy) to tell her what’s up, he gets pissed and freaked out and orders Fred to make Aja leave the hospital. Only he can’t find her. And when he does, she’s all dizzy, and passes out on the ride home, and when he drops her off the valet screams at him and slams the door in his face.

But the drummer wakes up, and when Fred goes to see him, he hears a story of two beings visiting him, and his realization that this was the end, only he wasn’t ready to go because it would cause too much pain. This is the only real mention of the subplot that the band’s bass player is gay and in love with the drummer, and even though the drummer is straight (I mean, I guess he could be bi, Pike doesn’t really go into details, but the point is they don’t end up together) he cares too much about his friend to just kick the bucket. So the smaller of the beings picked up on that and touched him, and then he woke up. 

There’s also a reporter there trying to talk to Fred and his best friend about the miracle that Aja performed, and they do their best to brush her off only she isn’t giving up. In fact, she’s using a YouTube channel to promote the idea that Aja is a goddess or something, with a video of the way she ended the bar brawl and testimony from a nurse in the hospital that she touched the drummer not long before he arose from life-threatening injuries. Fred agrees to meet with the reporter and actually gets more information than he gives up: namely, Aja has been curing and healing people since her days in Brazil and that she spoke with all of the villagers about her decision to leave for the US, saying there was an important reason to do so.

Before he can confront Aja and her handlers about it, her guardian dies. The valet says she’s written a letter to Fred, but he can’t seem to find it. So while we wait, let’s go on a date! Only someone in the restaurant recognizes Aja and insists she heal her daughter. And this is where we find Aja’s limitations: she can’t help this girl; her fate is to live for a short time. 

In blasting through the summary I might be glossing over Aja’s description of her connection to the cosmos and how her powers and abilities work. A lot of it ties back to the same things Pike loves to revisit when thinking about metaphysics: the oneness of Buddhist nirvana, letting go of desires and selfishness to connect to the unity of humanity, and being able to tap into superhuman powers once you’re linked. Aja calls the overarching all the “Big Person,” and her abilities come from what the Big Person tells her is necessary. She can act out of her own human desires, respond to the Little Person, but when she does it takes a toll on her health, which is what happened with the drummer. But how does someone so young get tapped into a consciousness so vast and lose her childish selfishness? We’ll get there.

Anyway, Fred goes to a band rehearsal the next day and is stopped on the way by a family who has another sick kid in the hospital, desperate for him to put them in touch with Aja. He doesn’t want to do it, knowing what he knows, but his friends accuse him of being overprotective. The best friend compares a lot of what Aja has said she does with practices she’s learned through yoga and meditation, to draw an explicit line for those in the audience who haven’t just read 94 other Pike books and didn’t look more deeply into Eastern religion because of it. And then Fred’s phone rings, and it’s the family, and they already talked to Aja and their daughter is feeling better so he doesn’t have to put himself out. What? The kid was in the hospital in another state. Aja explains that she’s not actually the vessel: the Big Person does the work, and all she’s doing is making it aware and asking the question of “can we?” 

The will reading for Aja’s guardian comes up, and in addition to splitting her (holy crap immense) wealth between Aja and the valet, she has also left instructions with her lawyer that Fred should get an audition with a record label in LA. The laywer also has the letter, which basically says that Fred can’t protect Aja from the infirm and ill, and he shouldn’t try. I guess this lady would know, right, having taken care of the girl for something like ten years. But word is getting out, more and more people are asking Aja for help, national reporters are starting to show up, Fred has a weird encounter with a spooky fortune teller in a graveyard, and he can’t help but be concerned. So he helps the valet hire a private security firm to keep these people away from Aja, which (when they follow her to school on Monday) prompts an emergency community meeting about the disruption of education by these horrible rumors.

As it turns out, this is actually a racist move by the principal, who has a reputation as an evangelical Christian and has unfairly targeted minorities (especially our drummer, who is Mexican) for years. He’s trying to get a lynch mob together without exactly saying as much. Only too bad for him a lot of people in the community (the more open-minded ones, the ones who have actually spoken to her) already support Aja, because of their own first-hand experience with her help. But enough people are screaming about Jesus that they’re just about ready to light up torches and drive Aja out of town. Until she reveals the racist principal’s big secret: he had a child with a black woman, and could never reconcile his love for them with his love for pointy white hoods or whatever, and then the kid died and he has always regretted it. And Aja holds his hands, and talks to him, and suddenly here comes the creepy fortune teller who it turns out was the mother of Racist Principal’s child, and they embrace and apologize and forgive, and the meeting is suddenly over.

Somewhere in all the Aja hullaballoo, the best friend took off to New York to live with her mother. She won’t answer Fred’s calls, she won’t respond to texts, and Aja (the last one to see her before she left) insists that she can’t be the one to reveal her confidences. So Fred goes to see her dad and try to get more info. Now this isn’t the first time Best Friend has left with the mom: the first was right after they got divorced, only she moved back a year later without any explanation. And the divorce was just as sudden and explanation-free, only the dad just accepted it. And Fred realizes, while he’s standing there in the living room and picking up hints from the dad and looking at old pictures where both women look uncomfortable: he’s a sexual predator. He touched his daughter inappropriately, because his wife and her mother was somehow loveless (leading to the girl coming back the first time) and so he partook of some fucked-up urges. Only the girl has never been able to accept that it wasn’t her fault, and in talking to Aja and exploring herself is she just getting there. So of course she needs to not LIVE with the motherfucker while she’s coming to grips.

Fortunately for Fred so he doesn’t stab a bitch, the trip to LA is nigh. Aja goes with him, and he plays his demos live, finishing with the new song he’s still writing for her. Of course that’s the song they want, and they hustle him into a recording session with an engineer to lay down a single. On the way back, Best Friend calls and asks if she can stay with him and his parents long enough to graduate high school with her friends, and as their flights land within a couple hours of each other in Sioux Falls, they plan to drive home together. Fred and Aja get there first, and he has to intimidate the dad away from the airport before his friend gets there. Only that can’t work for the whole state: he’s waiting for them to drive out of the parking lot, and attempts to run them off the road to take back his little girl.

Did I mention that it’s winter in South Dakota? The interstate is a sheet of ice, and these assholes are playing chicken at 100 mph. Of course they wreck the cars, and the kids get off with minor bumps and bruises. The dad isn’t so lucky:  his car has overturned and trapped him inside. Now the best friend is upset with him, but she’s not a sociopath and he’s still her dad, so they work to pry him out of the car before it explodes. But the way he’s bleeding and choking, he’s probably going to die anyway, so she wants Aja to heal him. And this is Fred’s great test of faith: do I argue against this and risk losing my best friend, or do I go along and risk losing my girlfriend? He finally agrees to let her listen to the Big Person.

Of course Aja collapses immediately upon laying hands on the molester. But by the time emergency response gets to the accident, he’s feeling better and Aja is fading fast. She can now finally tell Fred about her childhood, her past, which she has long avoided. It turns out that her dad was a drug dealer who stole from his bosses, and as punishment they sent three strongarms to kill the whole family. Only when they murdered Aja’s mother, her soul fled her body, leaving a gap for connection to the Big Person. The female enforcer sensed this and took the kid and ran ... and this female enforcer ended up being Racist Principal’s baby momma. No, I don’t know how it works, get your own globe. 

But now she’s given her all to Molester Dad and is on her way out. Still, her reason for coming to South Dakota was a good one: love. She knew that Fred needed her, and she knew that he would benefit from the connection she might provide to the Big Person. And even though her time was fated to be short, she feels happy that she completed her mission of love, and trusts that Fred will continue to spread the message. One last kiss, and she’s gone.

They end up at a hospital, and of course they want to do an autopsy on Aja to see why she died so suddenly and unexpectedly. The valet is firmly against it, and manages to get custody of the body and take it home, where he and Fred say one last goodbye before he lights the shit on fire. It’s a good thing she already filled out a will, that gave all her money to Fred, and that the lawyer has a copy of it!

There’s a long-ass epilogue that talks about what happened to everyone. The best friend has kids of her own and almost never talks to her dad, the two other band members founded a holistic medicine company in San Francisco and got married but to other people, and Fred himself was never able to leverage his meeting and audition into his own performing career but now writes hit songs for other people. But I guess none of them are about Aja, because now he had to write a book about it? And it’s done! The end!

See what I mean? This shit has been done before, almost beat for beat, and by the SAME AUTHOR. Now I’m not averse to reading a book again (cf. this whole goddamn project), but at least I’m going into the book knowing it is what it is. I’m not expecting to see something that is labeled a new work that actually retells a previous story that I literally just read. Maybe James Patterson can get away with that, but I don’t read his books either. 

Simon Pulse, 2014 441 pages, 9 chapters + prologue and epilogue ISBN 978-1-4424-6734-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Bl 2014 OCLC: 1065025018 Released December 2, 2104 (per B&N)

A month after her connection, Jessie Ralle starts dreaming about a young thief who mysteriously disappears in a flash of light. On the ninth night of the same lucid dream, she herself sees the flash, and wakes up next to the thief and four others in transport to a deserted jungle island. There are no ideas, no instructions, no obvious goals. There’s just a clue, a plaque mounted near their drop-off point that indicates that six groups just like theirs are here, but only one will make it out alive.

In other words: Remember that world-building we had in the first book, where it was implied that Jessie and her baby daughter were going to be integral components to the new and evolving leadership among the witch council? Remember the difficulty and heartbreak of Jimmy only being alive in one half of her life? Remember the potential new bonds of realizing her father was active in her upbringing, and could be again in both worlds? Well, fuck all that — let’s have a Hunger Games. 

OK, technically this is more like Battle Royale, and Pike actually makes a reference to it as the young adults acclimate to their surroundings. But it is undeniable the influence that Suzanne Collins had on YA fiction, and certainly YA sci-fi/fantasy/analogues. In the wake of Katniss Everdeen, the market felt like it made a hard shift from doomed supernatural romances to dystopian future societies. It would be irresponsible of Pike to not try to cash in on that.

But this book ... is lacking in this regard. Collins’ success was not just that she made us care about Katniss, but that we cared about the bigger problem endemic to her (and all the other contestants’) situation. And Pike doesn’t give us enough to care about here. We don’t know what the stakes are, beyond survival. We don’t know who these people are, where they come from, or what they have to live for. We don’t even know where they are or why. I’m assuming there was another book or two planned for this series that would eventually get us to the meanings and revelations of this battle and why they were chosen to fight it and what ultimately was to come out of it. But this shit was so unsatisfying and we care so little about anyone or anything here that I can’t imagine we’ll ever see resolution.

(Like, does Pike even care? He claimed when the first one came out that it was going to be his “finest work,” and that the series could go “over ten books.” But it’s been almost five years and we haven’t seen another one of these. He didn’t mention his newer works at ALL in that recent Electric Lit interview. So who knows?)

The biggest problem is that the characters and setting we already know makes such a drastic shift to accommodate this story. And, like, I get it. The model of the industry, especially when this book came out, almost requires that you have established characters and an ongoing storyline before you ever publish anything. But it doesn’t feel connected to what’s come before. At all. It’s a new place we’ve never seen, everyone in the action except Jessie is a new character (and remember there are thirty-five of them), and there is almost zero resolution or explanation for what’s happening. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been literally anybody. Like, this could just as easily have been a Sita book, and maybe it would have actually made more sense, except that there’s no other vampires left. It probably shouldn’t have been a book about Jessie, who has a uniquely important position in witch world in light of the high-profile deaths she’s overseen and her responsibility to the Special. None of what happens in this story fits with anything that’s led up to it, and we are left a) wondering why the hell we’re reading this and b) ultimately unsatisfied.

I don’t even necessarily feel like there’s much to summarize, but I’m gonna do it anyway, because I’m dedicated.

We start with a chapter about the thief — Marc — whose MO is to hide in the trunk of a fancy car he’s valet-parked, wait for the owner to take him home, and then make off with the jewelry she (usually it’s a she) was wearing after she falls asleep. This heist is going to be his last job, because he doesn’t want to risk someone putting together a pattern that these high-profile thefts all came in the wake of the victims having been at his theater. So he steals the lady’s necklace and then her car to safely get out of Dodge, but when he stops to take a leak the light appears.

This is the dream Jessie has for over a week. The rest of the story is told from her immediate perspective, in first-person present tense just like a good little dystopian. She’s wondering about the dream, but she’s more concerned about who she just saw in the mall: the Highlander and President Coroner, just sitting there eating ice cream like they didn’t both get fatal holes in their chests last month. And yes, this is in witch world, where they died. She tails them and discovers they’re staying with (of course) the Alchemist, who tells Jessie there’s a reason for this and she needs to be prepared for ... something big, he isn’t clear on it. The Council has more info, maybe: the bad witches need to replace their leadership, and Jessie is first in line because she facilitated the killing. But what about the fact that she just saw President Coroner? The Council has an answer to that as well: one of the witch genes allows its bearer to control time, and so probably the Alchemist has that and has brought her and the Highlander forward from the past for some reason.

So Jessie goes home and has the dream again, only this time when the light appears she feels as though she’s yanked from her bed. She wakes up in the real world (and yes, I have expressed my hate for these names, but I’m sticking with them for consistency’s sake) in some kind of a shipping container with five other dudes, all of them wearing identical green outfits and matching unbreakable bracelets. And yes, one of them is Marc. The others are a precocious genius who’s going to MIT at 16, a quiet and scared Korean girl, an Israeli military fighter, and a Sudanese farmer who exudes strength and just seems to accept the situation. All of them were snatched at about the same time, globally and not locally — morning for the Americans, evening for Africa and Israel, middle of the night in Korea. But as far as Jessie can tell, she’s the only witch. So what is this about? 

They don’t get very far before the next chapter, where Jessie wakes up in witch world and realizes she’s in some deep shit. She spends all day trying to find Marc, but like ... if he’s not connected, how is this going to help? She ends up not doing anything about it, and awakens again in the real world on some kind of volcanic jungle island. They find the aforementioned plaque and immediately realize that they’re going to need to work together and find a place to defend. They also need food, and so Jessie has to start showing her hand when she catches a bunch of fish just by grabbing them out of the water. They find a cave to hide out in, but they also see some fast-moving people in gray outfits, presumably another set of contestants.

The Israeli wants to hunt them down — kill before we get killed, she says — and so everyone except the brain and the Korean go tracking. What they find is a grotesque death scene: five bodies in various states of dismemberment. It’s not the gray people there, though: it’s a giant Swede who has a deal for Jessie. He wants her to kill her humans as a show of faith, and he’ll do the same, and then they can team up against the other witches. Because of course he’s gotten all the information already, having made better use of his interim day in witch world than stalking some boy. Jessie refuses, and they fight, only the Swede has a healing factor that works almost immediately. Luckily some of Jessie’s time-controlling gene kicks in and she manages to run away, but her teammates aren’t so lucky. Another witch shows up and throws motherfucking LAVA at them, killing the Israeli and spearing the Sudanese to a tree.

So her next day in witch world needs to be more productive than the last one. Jessie calls up the Council, who is all pissed off that she didn’t come to them already. To survive, they say, she’s gonna have to go back to the Alchemist, because obviously this is what he wanted to prepare her for. So she shows up and talks to the Highlander, who starts working with her on fighting. Specifically, he forcibly activates her telekinesis power by throwing her off a cliff. So after this she’s gonna want to unwind with her family and enjoy their time together, right? Nope — she goes straight to Marc’s house and tells him the world’s least believable story, ending in the prospect that she might want to try to kill him so his witch powers activate in the other world. But haven’t we already said that killing someone in witch world means they’re totally dead? Technicalities. So she gets home and, oh shit, Jimmy’s mad that she went on a date with some random dude without talking to him at all about her troubles! What a silly boy!

When they wake up in the real world again, the Sudanese warrior is totally healed. Apparently the Korean girl has a super-powered healing factor even though she’s not a witch, tied somehow to the death of her twin sister, who presumably channels the power through her. They’ve also been offered a truce by a couple of other witches, not the ones who tried to kill them last night. So they partner up, but the Korean girl’s healing factor is instantly undone when she tries to fix one of the other dude’s teammates but they die randomly on the walk. (Probably actually secretly strangled by the lava-thrower, who Jessie learned yesterday can also make herself invisible.) They talk about the bracelets, which have some kind of weird stone inside, and one of the other witches says he’s found the source: a giant wall that blocks off half of the island they’re on, which you can only see if you climb to the top of the volcano.

As they’re walking, the gray team attacks ... sort of. These people are short and pale, almost albinos, but they move faster than any human can and Jessie knows they have some kind of group mind that allows them to work together. They surround the group and lure them into a battle with the giant Swede, and while they’re fighting him the invisible lava thrower murders all the humans except five: Marc (who does take a poisoned knife to the back), brain boy, Korean healer, and two dudes on a new witch’s team. Jessie manages to lop off her hand and collect her bracelet before she totally vanishes and gets away. Oh, and the other witch has captured the leader of the albinos, and is holding her hostage to attempt to lure in the rest of them. She doesn’t talk, but her telepathy is unsettling at best.

Jimmy shakes her awake in witch world and tells her to do whatever she has to in order to survive. If that means blowing another dude, whatever. So Jessie calls up the Council, which gives her a little more info on the two witches she’s teamed up with. Watch out for the second one, they say (not the one who’s tied up an albino), because he might have choked his last boyfriend to death and successfully covered it up. She goes back to the Alchemist’s house, where President Coroner pins her down about why their present selves can’t help Jessie train. So she has to limit just what she says about their deaths, and in turn they limit telling her that they traveled to Jessie’s funeral in the near future. 

Fuck this training, then, right? Jessie figures the only thing to do is help Marc live, and to do that she’ll have to activate his witch genes. But to convince him to die she’s probably gonna have to give up the booty ... only she can’t do it, she’s too busy thinking of Jimmy for a change in this novel. He wants to go through with it anyway (the death, I mean) but she has second thoughts and isn’t ready to put him through it. So they fall asleep next to each other and wake up in a cave on the side of the volcano, where the other two witches are fighting. It seems the first dude had his teammates on watch, but they mysteriously choked to death in the night while the second dude was backing them up. Huh. But they have to keep moving, climbing to the place where the second dude said he saw the wall, for ... like, reasons. 

They find another cave near the top of the volcano, and inside there are drawings showing a woman who looks suspiciously like the Council president touching a bracelet to a giant wall. They have to learn more, but the second witch isn’t eager to reapproach the wall. Brain Boy wants to go, so they agree that Chokey Witch can watch Healing Girl and Slowly Dying Marc while the rest of them investigate. Brain Boy touches the wall and freezes, and even though Jessie knocks him away immediately he senses that a lot more time passed, and he’s seen things that happened in witch world but not the real world. So Jessie wants to try, and when she touches it she’s suddenly playing red queen with the dead gambler from the first book, who reminds her that there’s more to the game than just the next card in her own hand. What? I don’t know.

She comes to on the ground with a lot of screaming going on. The Swede is back, so she and the first witch have to fight him. But he forgets Jessie’s plan and attacks weird, getting stabbed in the gut by one of the flying spears Jessie is controlling with her new telekinesis. Oh, and here’s Invisible Lava Thrower too, about to kill Brain Boy! He acknowledges that there’s nothing he can do and succumbs so Jessie has enough time to grab the Swede’s head and crank it around 360 degrees. Lava Girl vanishes, and Jessie picks up our other witch and carries him back to the cave, which is suddenly being guarded by all six albino dwarves. The other witch says that in this proximity, killing the leader will cause all of them to die because of the group mind, so Jessie sneaks up and lops off  her head, and then goes inside the cave by herself.

Sure enough, there’s Lava Girl, holding Chokey at machete-point. Marc is mostly submerged in a freezing stream, and Healing Girl is just, like, there. Chokey fights free, but of course Lava Girl hits him with ... you know, because they’re INSIDE A FUCKING VOLCANO. Only Jessie has realized something: these bracelets with the rock inside that matches the wall control their physical connection to the island. Lava Girl looks sick, pale, and weak since she’s lost hers, and when Jessie casually chucks it into the lava she drops dead.

And now Healing Girl comes to. She wants to try to help revive Marc before it’s too late, and wants to study the poisoned knife. Only she then tries to stab Jessie with it. Turns out that when she was alone with the first witch, the one hiding outside with a spear through his guts, he used his strongest power: mental suggestion. He turned Healing Girl into a slave, designed to kill those who weren’t expecting it. Jessie uses all her mental powers to break the hold, upon which Healing Girl ... jumps right into the motherfucking lava herself. 

I don’t know, I guess because we’re getting close to the end.

So Jessie disguises herself as Healing Girl and goes to confront the last witch standing besides herself. Who, surprise, does NOT have a spear through his guts. Apparently he can disguise himself too, in addition to the hypnosis. So he tells her to kill herself with the knife, but she stabs him in the lungs just before dropping her disguise, and then ... slits her wrists.

So Marc can live.

Because only one can survive, and of course it should be some dude we just met rather than the main character of the LAST TWO BOOKS. THE ENTIRE SERIES THUS FAR.

But as Jessie’s soul is floating away, she sees something. She sees herself, only older. Even though I thought once you were connected you stopped aging. And she tells herself that it’s not over, and they can go wherever they want to go ... or whenever, rather.

The epilogue takes place at Jessie’s memorial service (not actually a funeral, because there is no body, Jessie’s just been missing for a month but because Marc is now connected they think they know what happened) where Jimmy approaches Marc and they talk about what they know. In particular, Jimmy asks Marc to watch after his real-world son, who oh yeah there was an unfollowed thread where they got a DNA report that said he wasn’t actually Jimmy’s kid but it was also prepared by Jessie’s still-mostly-absentee father who has an agenda in ascending the ranks of the Council so its authenticity is questionable. But then they talk about Jessie and ... neither one thinks she’s actually dead.

And that.

Is the end of Black Knight.

I can sort of pick out the seeds that Pike is sowing in this story. I can start to sense the coming trails and paths the characters might walk in the supposedly potential ten-book series about witches. But like. You just essentially killed your MAIN CHARACTER. Your NARRATOR. And we don’t actually care about this jewel thief guy, who by all appearances is a BAD PERSON. But you went ahead and put him in the forefront. 

Simon Pulse, 2013 441 pages, 17 chapters + prologue and epilogue ISBN 978-1-4424-6731-6 LOC: PZ7.P626 Thb 2013 OCLC: 795175747 Released March 5, 2013 (per B&N)

With all the bad guys destroyed, Sita and her friends should be safe, right? Not so fast — there’s still a nationwide manhunt going on, enhanced by the computer program that’s already told authorities about Team Vampire. On top of this, the now-headless devil’s advocate had a photo in her suitcase implying that the evils are after a sacred artifact that Sita came into contact with during World War II. To beat them to it, she’ll have to trace a past that she can’t remember in order to cancel a deal she didn’t make.

With this book, it feels like Pike is finding his stride with the modern YA genre. It’s more pages than we strictly need to tell the story, the group is given reasons for existence beyond “Sita likes us,” and the vampires finally fuck. That said, it does use some of Pike’s favorite tropes: flashbacks, Hinduism, the consistent timeline, jumping from high places, muthafuckin lizard aliens. You’re not going to mistake this for someone else’s work, especially if you’ve already read The Wicked Heart.

Yep! Pike is reusing his old assets again! This time, it’s the evil descendant of Heinrich Himmler ... well, sort of. We’ll get there. I guess it was only a matter of time before Sita had an Adventure With Nazis, considering how the Holocaust is a monster of a humanitarian travesty, relatively prominent in American minds, and it’s natural that Pike would want to explore how she might have tried to fight it. Plus it’s kind of a get-deep-quick card in terms of how your story is going to be received, and it does sell books. (I was recently at my kid’s book fair — at an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL — and was alarmed by the number of books about WWII and the Holocaust.) 

Whatever it is, I am really not into white dudes fictionalizing Nazi Germany. But I read this anyway, because I’m dedicated or something. 

I might as well jump in with the summary, and I’m going to try to be quick about it, even though I pretty much need to re-read the book. But as I said, there’s a lot less action in this story, and we already know Sita and her backstory from the last eight, so I don’t have to be quite as worried about leaving stuff out. Still, this book kind of comes from nowhere, so I’ll do my best to be fast yet thorough.

We pick up where The Shadow of Death left off, with Sita deciding whether or not to return to Earth. Of course she does, because she’s got friends to take care of and a headless demon channeler to bury. But in going through the kid’s effects, she finds a picture of a couple, the woman looking familiar for some reason. When she looks closer at the picture, she sees why: there’s another photo on their table of another couple, and these ones were friends and confidants to Sita in Paris in the 1940s. There are two reasons why the devil might have a picture of these people, and Sita isn’t buying the first, that it’s a link to her. It must be the other: the woman is the most likely owner of the Veil of Veronica, a sacred cloth used to wash Jesus’s face as he carried the cross and now containing some of his essence.

Sita and Immortal Boyfriend want to follow the trail, but CEO is less inclined. She feels that hiding out is going to be better for them, because sooner or later the national law enforcement search for them is going to at least shift to the back burner and it will be safer to move around the country. But when Sita calls the last number dialed on Demon Girl’s phone and gets Satan himself on the line, the decision is made: they have to get the veil before the evil does. So they drive to Vegas (again, fuckin’ Vegas), where CEO has a stash of cash and some fake IDs for everybody, which ... weird. But she buys a jet and they take off for North Carolina, where they’ve traced this couple in the picture.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Sita book if they could just travel unencumbered. They’re targeted by a couple of military jets, which Sita dispatches by jumping out of the plane and forcing one pilot to eject before using his missiles to blow up the other. Everybody parachutes to safety (well, not the military pilots) and hitchhikes with a trucker to Chapel Hill, en route to which Sita has to hypnotize a couple more cops at a roadblock (though the trucker is cool). Then they set the humans up at a hotel while she and Immortal Boyfriend go scope out the address. Right away it’s clear they’re too late: there are two dudes with critical injuries on the floor. One is the husband, and Sita manages to hypnotize him into describing the attackers and what they’ve done with his wife, only she doesn’t understand how they took her into the sky. He doesn’t know where the veil is, but they find a book written in code across four different languages. Sita also finds footprints leading away from the house ... to a charred circle in the grass, glowing with radioactivity.

The other dude on the floor showed up and tried to help, the husband says before he dies, so they decide to take him back to the hotel and see if he has more intel. Back at the hotel, Sita heals his head injury, enough that he wakes up and tells her he knows a little bit about what they’re doing but he can’t explain why or how he got the information. He does maintain that he can disable the tracking program that’s made them wanted criminals, using a mishmash of technology in a bag that they found in what was obviously his watch nest, but Sita insists that he needs to sleep first. She’s not gonna sleep, though: she’s gonna flash back to her experience in Nazi-occupied Paris, breaking a resistance leader out of a torture cell and bringing him to her friends, who are both doctors, for a little underground treatment. This is a prominent memory of the veil and how it can help soothe and calm fears, and maybe even ward off evil, which Sita needed after a long night of infiltrating a Gestapo headquarters and soaking up the terrors within.

She tells this story to Seymour and Immortal Boyfriend the next day, as they fly their new plane to New York. It's the home base of the phone number Sita dialed on their deceased spy's phone, after all, and they've traced it to a monster of a law firm that CEO can tell is shady through her own experience. How did they get the clearance to fly? Well, it seems that our mysterious new spy wasn't lying about his ability to throw a snarl at the Internet program and slow it down long enough to free up Team Vampire to slip through security. Our immortals kidnap the lawyer and get him to admit that his firm was working with the Indian girl on background checks, and also that they funnel dark money to the Pentagon for what is rumored to be military spacecraft. He doesn't get a chance to say more, though — armed mercenaries blow up the entire side of the hotel, taking him out, though Sita and Immortal Boyfriend escape over the roof and down the back stairs.

They did manage to make off with the lawyer's laptop, though, and while New Spy hacks it Sita traces him through his fingerprints, because of course there's a missing persons report out on him. In talking to the dude's wife and son, though, she's confused to learn that he's just, like, some guy. No particular skills, talents, or intelligence, just a decent dude who withdrew ten grand from his bank account and disappeared. Oh, but he did have a passion for astronomy, and in the last month before he took off he could be found staring at one star through a telescope for hours on end.

When she returns, New Spy has news: the military is definitely developing spacecraft, out at Nellis Air Force Base in, yep, fuckin' Vegas again. Seymour makes a connection from this development to the number of early NASA scientists who were reformed Nazis, but Sita warns him to shut the fuck up before he reveals too much. She tells him a little more of the story on the flight out: how she learned about changes in the Germans' military movement plans and swam across the English Channel to inform Allied forces (including a one-on-one meeting with George S. Patton, who insisted he knew her from a past life) but returned to Paris to find her SS informant murdered, her friends taken into custody, and a cold-blooded major waiting with a weird piece of tech that incapacitated her and allowed him to round her up as well. Related to the Telar torture device? Maybe. Seymour is seeing connections all over the place — not just that, but also from Sita's experiences as a prisoner of war to her interactions with the demon duke of Italy, way back when this series was still called The Last Vampire. Both times there was an artifact that supposedly had Christ's blood on it, both times she was tortured and taken prisoner, and both times she couldn't quite remember the end of the story. He might have a plan to help her remember, but we're going to have to wait to find out what it is.

There's a more pressing problem: New Spy is becoming incapacitated by swelling in his cranium. Sita takes him to a hospital as soon as they land, and he makes her swear that as soon as he's done with the procedure she'll take him wherever they go next. Yeah, Vegas isn't it, apparently, though if New Spy knows where is he ain't saying. While he's undergoing brain surgery she reads what he's managed to translate of the coded diary they found. It's a story narrated by Veronica herself, about meeting a Master (you know, one of Pike's favorite enlightened humans) and learning how to step outside both of our own thoughts and of society's restrictions and expectations. Then she goes back to the hotel to see what Seymour has planned and figure out their next steps.

Only first she has to fuck Immortal Boyfriend. Yeah, they talk about lost love and painful loneliness first, and how angry they’ve been at each other, and then they realize they might only have each other for eternity, and so it's time to hop on the meat train to Bone Town. I don't know — maybe it makes more sense than I'm painting here. I was, after all, always the dude who didn't see the intense horniness in Pike books when I read them as a teen. Still, it's felt for a while like neither of them is ready to move past Teri. Besides, Sita herself has become progressively more connected and enlightened through her various absorption of higher-level immortals and maybe gods, so what does she need a boyfriend for? The whole thing doesn't actually feel like love, necessarily ... more like a deep and abiding connection that they've decided must inevitably lead to Naked Time. And maybe I'm OK with a physical and emotional relationship that isn't the be-all and end-all of the storyline, but it still feels a little forced here.

Anyway, they go find Seymour and learn that his plan is to try to go into a mutual hypnotic trance with Sita to help her remember just what happened in that concentration camp. And it works like whoa: she starts flashbacking hardcore, to being kept in a basement cell for forty days without food or water. At the end of it the major shows up with a familiar-looking woman, and they know about her past. Like, a lot of her past, including her role in the battle described in the Mahabharata, where Arjuna called down a divine fire that obliterated a seemingly overwhelming enemy. They want her to tell them what she knows and what she saw during the battle, and torture her when it's not what they want to hear. She's chained to a pole in the courtyard, either to humiliate her or warn the other prisoners, but of course her friends from Paris find her and try to break her out. There's a mass gassing, a visit from Himmler himself, a failed attempt to unlock her shackles, and a promise to hide the improved key in her cell before the next torture session, but this time they're going psychological on her ass: they've captured her resistance leader friend and actually start flaying off his skin before she finally cracks.

As with the Nazi capture, as with the Duke of Death, it's like this part of her memory has been walled off somehow, and it took this pain to unlock it. How inconvenient that Pike took pains way back in 1994 to make it clear that Sita remembered everything that ever happened to her. But anyway, she tells the military dudes about finding Krishna during the battle and hearing him talk about alien observers watching the battle, maybe even having their own that echoes what's happening on Earth. He warns the soldiers to leave it alone, but a couple of them know what Sita is and coerce her into entering a large dome that is not safe for any human, because of an energy source that gives off a glowing heat. That's all the dudes can get out of her with this hypnosis session: she comes to all the way back to present day out of this flashback-within-a-flashback. It's easy to see, though, that the Nazis figured they could win the war with this technology, but how were they going to recreate it? Unless they somehow already had it. Unless they'd found an actual ship in India, on an artifact hunt like the ones ol’ Indiana Jones likes to thwart, and were trying to activate it using the knowledge from their literal link to the past.

Immortal Boyfriend knows where to go now: Joshua Tree National Park. You remember, where Miracle Baby was conceived, where Sita fought off the muthafuckin lizard aliens to get him back. Apparently it's in the video game that they were warned about, which IB has kept playing and recently beaten but won't describe because he doesn't want to influence Sita's genuine reaction to what he expects to happen. They bust New Spy out of the hospital and steal an ambulance to drive there, and along the way he starts dropping hints that it's not exactly the veil that these folks are after. He makes a phone call, supposedly to his superiors, but somehow Sita knows it's to whoever is trying to find them and is now pissed at this sudden but inevitable betrayal. But there's nothing for it: they have to know this meeting is happening tonight in order to get the veil-keeper back.

Seymour suggests another trance session now that they're in a spiritually powerful place, and they get some more of Sita's past. Using the female doctor friend (the one who had the veil at the time) the Nazis torture Sita into remembering the inside of the ship: the dead men who tried to enter and perished before they could exit, the exposed radioactive power source that she manages to snap back into place. She remembers blacking out and being partially rescued by Original Vampire, only to be taken hostage thanks to the same torture box and reawakening as the craft flies over the battlefield. They broke free and Sita destroyed most of what she now realizes were nuclear weapons (though one fell and incinerated Arjuna's enemies, giving a white person credit for an ancient Indian doctrinal miracle) while Original Vampire killed their captors and somehow shot the ship up above the sky. But when this is all she remembers, the Nazis go to burn her friend alive. It's enough motivation for Sita to strain for the hidden key right in front of everyone and free herself, brutally murdering the major but failing to stop the female torturer from drenching her in gasoline. Her friend smothers the flames with — you got it — the Veil of Veronica. The artifact heals Sita and gives her the strength to break them out, but when she tries to find her resistance leader lover, she's frightened away by the way the female torturer is standing outside the door, soaking up the pain of so many prisoners in bliss. 

I know! It's President Coroner! Enough with the same-same, Pike! This one is even happening NOW!

So that was Sita's mistake: leaving the pain-sucker alive and running away from her fear. And here she comes, walking up the hill toward Team Vampire with her captive and a young man that looks like Himmler fucked this devil woman. Or he might be reanimated or reincarnated; Pike never deigns to explain this dude. He does explain that the evil torturing lady is the same wife of the Demon Duke from way back, even though now she’s fair instead of dark (and, y’know, had her heart ripped out). She explains that they (the Nazis) already know what happened: Sita and Original Vampire flew off into space somehow, were rescued by beings of a higher plane, and found being returned to Earth so mundane and unsatisfying that they asked to have all memories of the spaceships erased. And the ship is still here, disguised as one of the giant trees. However, the damn thing is locked and will only open for someone who's been in it before. And Sita’s the only one alive who’s done so. You see the Nazis' problem. But it doesn't matter what Sita does or tries — she can't get the sumbitch to open. And this is a problem, the woman points out, because they made a deal. And now Sita sees through her dark, evil eyes, and realizes that the devil can probably possess and direct more than one measly human.

If she can't open the thing, Devil Lady says, Sita will have to go with them, or else they'll start killing her friends. She agrees, and in saying her goodbyes learns that New Spy has managed to translate the end of Veronica's journal. It was finished by her brother, it turns out, because she was crucified as a heretic and a woman taking credit for a man's job, but in her final moments she successfully stepped outside her mind and was enlightened, and that hers is the face on the veil. So Sita figures we can all become one with the universal consciousness that drives our higher powers — the same one powering Krishna, Jesus, Miracle Teen — and so maybe she'll be OK. And this is what it takes for the spaceship to appear to everyone. She goes to it, and sure enough it opens, meaning she has control and can save her friends. But before she can go in, Devil Lady shoots her in the inferior vena cava and bails with Young Himmler. And they are never seen again. (See what I meant by "sort of" at the beginning of this article? Dude's role is so small he could have been anyone. He literally doesn’t even have a LINE.)

But now Sita is dying, and New Spy takes charge. If she gets on the ship, he explains, she can transcend time and have as much as she needs to heal. How the shit does he know this? Well, it turns out that our regular dude has been possessed by his ten-thousand-years-in-the-future self, with technological knowledge beyond anyone in the present. He’s grown up in a timeline where Germany won the war, and so there is no mysticism left, only hard science. So when he discovered a loophole through this ancient technique of viewing the past, an ability to alter his own world and bring some magic to it, he leapt at the chance. This moment — Devil Lady and Baby Himmler escaping — was his fork in the road, the way he could alter his own future. And while he’s explaining, this magical ship does all the work, healing Sita and chasing the bad guys and blowing them up. Or at least that’s what he says. We don’t see it, because we know how much Pike readers hate action sequences (good.thing the entire first half of the book wasn’t one). And now they can set back down in the timeline, wherever they want to be.

So Sita ... 

goddamn, this is infuriating ...

Sita goes BACK TO ANCIENT INDIA TO KILL THE ORIGINAL VAMPIRE AGAIN. Only this time she’s gonna do it when he’s an adult, when he comes to whisk her away from her family.

Only he somehow knows about it. He knows everything. He knows about her plans, her ideas, her potential future. But he also knows that Sita’s greatest regret is that she was never able to live her normal human life with her truest love and her child, and is willing to accept his own death if she carries it out. And she realizes: Immortal Boyfriend came back too. And he’s inside his father, somehow. And she’s not sure she can kill him.

And that is where this mother fucking vampire saga, spanning eight books and almost twenty years, leaves us hanging.

Witch World

Simon Pulse, 2012 521 pages, 24 chapters + epilogue ISBN 978-1-4424-3028-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Wi 2012 OCLC: 924501501 Released November 13, 2012 (per B&N)

(HELL YES I DID take this picture in Vegas. Way back in November, underscoring just how behind this entry is.)

Red Queen

Simon Pulse, 2014 ISBN 978-1-4424-3029-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Rd 2014 OCLC: 1030042441 Released August 19, 2014 (per B&N)

First I have to address the immediate question: It’s the exact same book. Like, down to pagination. (Yes, I read them both. We’ve already established I’m kind of a freak.) I don’t know why it has two different sets of catalog information. I don’t know why they changed the title, but I will hazard a guess that Witch World is a shitty title and it took slow or lacking sales for S&S to convince Pike/Pike to convince S&S to change it. I don’t know why they then picked a title that would be coming out shortly from another publisher, one that would go on to create a much more robust universe and move enough units to muddy any kind of search query. I don’t even really know why I bought them both. I don’t know a lot of things, and I’m not quite masochist enough to find out.

What I do know? This book is more of the same old shit. Like, OK, most people aren’t going to read all 95 of Christopher Pike’s books right on top of each other, so the connections and relationships might slide. But if you do, you start to see that this dude actually has no new or original ideas after ... let’s generously call it 1996. The beautiful girl in the California town in the middle of nowhere who goes on a weekend party outing with her friends, but then meets a dude with mysterious powers and ends up in a fatal situation, only to realize that she’s survived death and now has strength and vision beyond her prior ability or even imagination? A vision that taps her into an alternate parallel universe, where she’s had a child who has the potential to be the most powerful human ever, only evil forces know about this child’s genetics and want to use her for their own selfish and horrific ends? This is The Grave, gang. Well, mostly The Grave, with some Sita and Alosha and, yes, even Spooksville sprinkled in for flavor. But the point is, we’ve seen all of it already.

Pike has previously said that he felt rushed toward the end of his previous S&S days, and that he didn’t put everything he had into the stories he wrote because of being pulled in multiple directions. That’s fair, and it makes sense that he’d want to come back to something he felt wasn’t as good as it could be, something that didn’t get enough care and attention, and make it better. So it’s a little frustrating that this is what we get. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot of potential, but then again, so did The Grave. I can’t help but feel like Pike is still just trying to figure out what has sold, what has been attractive to people who read his books and others like them, and is retreading so much old ground that it’s starting to become flat and uninteresting. (Which might be part of my reticence to finish this project.)

One thing that’s new and notable about WW/RQ: it marks the placement of Pike’s first YA F-bomb. He’s been using “damn,” “hell,” and “bitch” since the beginning, and starting with EoI (eliding maybe one or two in Whisper of Death) he began liberally (not literally, mind) dropping “shit.” But “fuck” has been sacred, hallowed ground, off limits in any but his adult novels, never mind that this is pretty much what all of his characters want to do all the time. So imagine my profound shock when I picked this book up right around its release date* and encountered the word “unfuckable” on page 18. A sign of the times, yes, and of what was becoming permissible in YA, but to someone who had grown up with Pike and expected a certain voice and stance, this felt kind of wrong and out of place. Much like my opinion of Pike in the 21st century in general.

*This was another random club store find in a rural town in southern New Mexico. I don’t know why the store where I mostly bought diapers was getting Pike in hardback on or near release when nobody else even knew these books were available, and can’t imagine I’ll ever find out.

OK, summary time. Jessie Ralle has just graduated from high school and her entire senior class is going to Las Vegas to celebrate. Said entire class is like 200 people — so not only does Pike still not get what a small town is, but he demonstrates increasing disconnect from how young people actually act. Vegas is a two-hour drive from Apple Valley, California (where Jessie’s mom relocated them after her Hollywood doctor dad bailed on them for a hot young nurse, and also where none of this takes place). I barely even wanted to drive across town to my senior party, to say nothing of paying for a hotel and a fancy dinner with a massive group that I barely know. And that was before the Internet and streaming media allowed us to prune and curate what (and who) we interact with so ruthlessly. Like, if this was a class of 40, I’d be on board, but 200?

But apparently it’s a close-knit 200 people, even though we only ever meet like six of ‘em. Jessie’s riding in a car with four others: her best friend since childhood, the uptight salutatorian, the class nerd who of course has always had a crush on Jessie, and Jimmy. Jessie has loved Jimmy from afar since the beginning of high school, and from up  close for a couple of months this past winter, but he dumped her to go back to his previous girlfriend, who graduated early and hasn’t been seen around town since. That doesn’t mean Jessie is over him — far from it, actually — so this car ride is either going to work out in her favor or be super awkward and uncomfortable.

They get a three-bedroom suite at the MGM Grand for $150 over a weekend somehow. It is all I can do to suspend my disbelief. Like, I’ve been to Vegas (obviously; see top image). Pike obviously has too; his description of spatial mechanics is (mostly) on point, which is what makes this price thing so jarring. I’ve been responsible for booking hotel rooms there off and on for the last 20 years. And the one time we ever got a suite, it was almost twice that PER NIGHT and still only had one bedroom. (We split it six ways, and we all HAD jobs.) And this was in the beat-ass old Luxor in September 2006. Ain’t no way these fucking CHILDREN managed a SUITE in a PREMIER CENTER STRIP HOTEL SIX YEARS LATER FOR LESS. And Jessie has the gall to fucking COMPLAIN ABOUT THE COST.

I MUST STOP YELLING. I am so a dad, right?

But anyway, Jimmy doesn’t have a room — he wasn’t even sure he was coming on this trip. Jessie’s best friend offers for him to stay with them, which Uptight Salutatorian bitches about, but like, chill the fuck out, there’s a couch, right? He and Jessie have to talk about whether this is OK, and it turns out he left her because his ex was pregnant, but the baby died just after he was born. And Jessie isn’t OK. They’d been together long enough that this smacks of either an excuse or a manipulation, and she doesn’t like either option. She kicks him out and cries a lot, and then the gang all goes to dinner at the Bellagio, which is where this starts to get financially realistic when half the class balks at the cost of the meal and fucking bails. Yet the restaurant serves the rest, even giving these (again) CHILDREN bottles of wine, which messes Jessie up enough to kiss Nerd Crush. In front of Uptight Salutatorian, who (it turns out) likes HIM. So everyone gets pissed off at each other and takes off, and then Jessie and Best Friend go see O (the Cirque show inside the Bellagio). 

It’s page 35, by the way. Almost 500 to go yet. At least from here the story gets more focused and straightforward.

After the show, they want to gamble. CHILDREN. But they have fake IDs, so they head down to the Tropicana, an older hotel with lower minimums on blackjack, where they bump into a dude who seems strangely familiar to Jessie, even though she’s sure she never met him before. This dude is in town for a medical conference ... Jessie will later learn about his genome-scanning technology and what it implies for people like her, but she’s gonna have to figure it out first. He has an uncanny ability to win, and people start asking him for advice, but he denies them all. Except Jessie. They quickly pile up hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is where she’s hosed because they’ll never let her cash out that much with a fake ID. So the dude gives her his room key (not at this old-ass dirtball hotel, at the Mandalay Bay across the street) and says he’ll get her money and bring it up in a minute, and she should order some dessert from room service while she’s waiting.

No, they don’t fuck. They almost do, but then Jessie remembers Jimmy and realizes she’s still hung up on him, even though he wronged her and left her hanging. But she learns that the dude will cop to some unnatural method of knowing what’s coming next in the deck, which is why he managed to bet properly at the right times. He doesn’t show her, but he does teach her how to play twenty-two. Not twenty-one, which is blackjack: in twenty-two, aces are only worth one, but red queens are eleven. And if you get a natural twenty-two (queen of hearts and queen of diamonds), you win instantly, PLUS your opponent HAS to try to win their bet back in full on the next hand. The dude doesn’t state why these are the strict rules, but he does imply that a portion of the winnings goes to some mysterious party that doesn’t come clear yet.

So Jessie goes back to the hotel, where Jimmy is sitting on the floor outside. He’s been sexiled from the nerd’s room, because it turns out he was OK going after Uptight Salutatorian (who I guess isn’t so uptight after all). And he’s crying and he’s apologetic, and this coupled with Jessie’s realization in Mystery Gambler’s room is all it takes for her to accept him back. They have breakfast with everyone the next day (room service, more invisible money spent) and then Jessie and Jimmy drive out to Lake Mead to splash and swim and sex. But what’s weird is that it reminds them both of the first time ... which neither of them remembers the same way. Even more awkward is the ex showing up with a warning: “They never take just one, Jessie. They always take both.” (102)

This doesn’t make any sense, right? Well, Mystery Gambler has planted a seed that things might get confusing pretty quick, and invited Jessie to talk to him about it. So she hops in a cab back to his hotel, except the cab takes her out to a creepy industrial area instead. When it finally stops at a stop sign, she bolts, only she doesn’t know where she is now. Luckily, a beautiful woman in a red Porsche pulls up at that exact moment and offers to give her a ride. Which ... aren’t you even the slightest bit concerned that a strange car brought you out here and now another strange car has just pulled up right when you needed it? Obviously not, which is what leads to her getting tased and waking up in a meat freezer, where the safety ax is of course missing. She wrestles with the door and some meat-hanging apparatus for a while, but can’t get it open and ends up spraining her ankle in the process. And even though it’s dangerous to sit, to slow down, to stop moving in this freezer, Jessie can’t help herself.

She wakes up in a hospital. Only this room doesn’t look or feel like a typical hospital room. Plus, she can’t move. She can’t even blink. She’s briefly relieved when two doctors come in, but that goes away when she realizes they’re here to perform the autopsy. The senior doctor gets called out, which is all the other guy needs to start satiating his necrophilia all over Jessie’s corpse. He’s pretty shocked when Jessie suddenly sits bolt upright and curses him out — enough that he has himself a nice little heart attack right there in the morgue. The other doctor comes back, and she seems to know what happened, and is also weirdly thrilled by the guy’s obvious pain? But she leaves without taking any action, and Jessie sees this as her chance to get out of Dodge.

The hospital is downtown, which is a long way from the MGM Grand but at least it’s an obvious straight shot on Las Vegas Boulevard. Only Jessie doesn’t recognize some of these north-end casinos. She goes inside one to get her bearings and is quickly accosted by three punks, who she casually injures like it’s no thing. What’s even stranger is how quickly they back off and the degree of respect they suddenly accord her. And even stranger than that is that the blackjack tables don’t say “blackjack.”

You guessed it. People in Las Vegas are playing red queen.

So now she has to talk to Mystery Gambler more than ever. She walks all the way to the Mandalay Bay, because fuck a taxi anymore, right? Only it’s called the Mandy, and his room on the top floor is now one floor lower than it used to be. But as it turns out, he does have some answers. He first tells Jessie the truth of why he's in Vegas: his whole medical conference story is just a front. There is some basis in reality, in that his group has identified certain genes that, when awakened, enable essentially superpowers. His genetic sensor identified that Jessie has seven of these genes — but he already knew that. He seems to know a creepy amount for some rando she just met. And also, he keeps calling her Jessica, and she realizes she's using a longer version of his name too, reflexively, even though he never called himself that in their interactions.

This, plus the hotels and the casino game and the fact that, y'know, she woke up on a fucking MORGUE TABLE a few hours ago help Jessie to realize the truth of her situation. With a little guided meditation, which helps her to remember things that never actually happened to her, she learns that there are two simultaneous dimensions happening on Earth, we live two lives in parallel, and the extra genes (when activated) allow people to experience both. These people, historically, are who we think of as witches, so for lack of a better term this second dimension is colloquially called witch world. Like, super lazy writing, right? I guess Pike blew his load inventing names for shit in Alosha and couldn't be arsed to consider that maybe twelve thousand years of connected humans might have named something themselves. (Yeah, I said twelve thousand years. Back at it again with the same timeline.)

But one of those things Jessie remembered is having a baby. This is where her father (remember, the dude who bailed on Jessie and her mom) suddenly shows up. We learn that he left (in the “real” world, not in witch world where he’s still present in her life) because he realized the importance of Jessie and her fate, and hoped that his absence would protect both her and the baby to come. (He has the "seeing-the-future" gene, I guess?) According to Dad, this baby is potentially the most important person in the history of both worlds, because she's the only one to have ever been born with all ten extra genes. It's also a weird connection, because this is the only occasion that anybody knows of where a child has been born to different parents in the two worlds. (The kid is an entirely different person because of that, so that's weird too.) But, just like the boyfriend's ex-girlfriend warned, "they" have taken both. 

"They" turn out to be a cadre of witches who want to use their powers to elevate themselves rather than ... well, it's never really made super clear what the "good" witches do. Like ... hang out and be immortal? Oh yeah, I didn't mention that once you're awakened you can't die of natural causes. I guess the dad says that sometimes they'll interfere when shit is really going sideways, but for the most part they want regular humans to regulate their own affairs. It's the Telar again! Only, no, wait, they call themselves the "Tar" in this book so it's obviously totally different. And yeah, both babies have been taken; they let the boyfriend think his son died in infancy so that he'd eventually be a lever to manipulate Jessie when he realized he had two living children. But it sounds like the daughter is already causing trouble for her kidnappers, without even being aware of her ten genes, which ... 

I don't know, it doesn't make any sense now that I'm writing about it. Like, I'm cool with the parallel dimensions, I'm on board with dying to become awakened, I'm down with extra powers and whatever. I'm even mostly OK with this story reusing so many assets from all these past books. But like ... how does the baby have some (even unconscious) control of her locked genetic powers when her counterpart in the real world is not only still alive, but had a different MOTHER and is therefore a totally different PERSON? The first chapter of the sequel (all I’ve read of it so far) doesn’t make it look promising that we’re ever gonna find out, so just keep suspending the shit out of that disbelief, I guess.

But anyway, now that Jessie’s connected, she’s hell-bent on rescuing her baby. Which I think she would have done even if she were still separated, but whatever. And I know, easy to think that not actually having a memory of the baby might make it difficult, but these memories are slowly bubbling up and emerging, especially strong ones like parenthood and family. She’s been warned against contacting Jimmy (or “James,” I guess) in witch world, but she doesn’t hesitate to tell him all the crazy shit that’s happened to her in the real world.

(This is another reason I have a problem with the lazy naming conventions on display. To witches, “witch world” is the most real. Each day takes place first there in their perceptions, followed by the same day in the “real world.” We’ll also see how events in witch world have a stronger effect on events in the real world; namely, if you die in witch world you pretty much always die in the real but the inverse is not true. So, once again, why wouldn’t witches have come up with some more appropriate naming patterns at least, given how old the oldest is? Just more lazy crap we gotta swallow.)

So anyway, Jimmy doesn’t believe her; he thinks someone drugged Jessie with a hallucinogenic and now she’s having altered state memories. So she gets out of the car they’re driving to the desert and picks it up to prove her new strength. Why are they driving in the desert? For some reason, Jessie is drawn to the power associated with the nuclear tests that the government ran in the barren nowhere that is most of Nevada. There’s gotta be a reason, after all, that the centers of witch power are here. So they bust into the deserted testing ground, only to discover it’s not that deserted — there’s a kid out there apparently living by himself. He takes to Jimmy immediately and agrees to come back to the city with them, where they’re going to talk more to Jessie’s dad.

The kid can’t speak, but he can write — with a prehensile tail that he has heretofore hidden by wrapping it around his waist. He tells them about the other freaks that live out in the nuked test cities, as well as the mean man who brings him food. The rationale isn’t clear, and the kid isn’t talking ... well ... you know what I mean. But this is where Jimmy finds out his son is still alive and being used as bait. And dude fucking TAKES it: as soon as his ex calls and wants to discuss what she might know about the children, not only does he refuse to step back and let the powerful people handle the rescue, but he actually wants to go through the death process in order to awaken his awareness of both sides.. They don’t let him do that, because apparently our good guys are not allowed to actively connect more witches, except when they are. So all they can do is talk to the ex and learn that she doesn’t care who she sells out to as long as it saves her son, which ... fair. But Jimmy isn’t willing to go that far, and they head back to her dad’s house to regroup, where they realize they’re being watched.

Or they were, I guess. There’s a car with two obvious spies in it, but they’re dead, and the killer is hanging out nearby. This dude is, we learn, second-in-command of the Tar leadership, a five-thousand-year-old Celt who wants to take a more proactive approach in encouraging good and deterring evil in both humans and witches, mostly with his sword. He’s a Highlander, is what I’m trying to say. He takes Jessie out to a sacred spring in the mountains, where they swim naked together, as you do when you first meet an ancient Celtic swordsman, right? But there’s some cliff writing out here, written by the ancient people in a script the Highlander knows, having been taught it by the man who turned him so many years ago. It describes a woman who will have such power that she controls the destiny of the world, and it’s essentially Jessie’s daughter. So like ... tell me something I don’t know, right? What’s more new and unusual is the Highlander’s description of red queen, how it was taught to him and spread throughout ancient Rome, and how a certain percentage of all winnings, no matter who takes it, has to ultimately return to his benefactor, who we’ll call the Alchemist because that’s what Pike calls him.

We’re going to have to wait on more description, because the Highlander takes Jessie home and we skip-cut forward to the next night in witch world, where she’s meeting the leadership council and discussing their intents to rescue the baby. Mystery Gambler is there too; he's going to act as Jessie's liaison to the bad guys, having served as a double agent since the Civil War. This scene seems like it might be superfluous, except that you mostly only retain the memories from the dimension in which you die, and so the council knows that Jessie needs some backstory.  (Don't we all.) The main thing we get out of this is that they've kind of figured out that WANTING to activate their witch genes has a high correlation with witches going bad at all, especially when they try to engineer the birth of high-number witches. So Jessie's contact with Jimmy was carefully arranged so as to appear NOT engineered, because even though the future sight told them that these two were compatible and would fall in love and make a power baby, any appearance of forcing it could make things all fucked up.

So Jessie's entire life is a sham, manipulated by sources of power she was never supposed to see, one of those being her own goddamn father.

What next? Well, on to the other purpose of this meeting: prep for said meeting with the bad guys. The council expects that they're going to offer Jessie her baby back, as long as both of them live under bad-guy control, and they want her to string them along while they figure out what to do. Great fuckin' plan, guys. You've been trying to make a power baby for how many thousand years, and you didn't have a contingency plan if it got kidnapped?

But so Jessie and Mystery Gambler go to the next meeting, and this is starting to sound like work. As it turns out, the leader of the bad guys is (plot twist that surprises nobody!) the coroner who was unfazed when Jessie sat up in the morgue. She's making this deal because the baby is difficult, and they think that if she has her mother that they'll be able to control her and her powers. They let Jessie hold her, which activates even more of those mom connections, but when they go to take her away the baby cries and creates almost a physical wall, which the big strong guard man has to fight with all his might to overcome. President Coroner has no qualms with the possibility that she might have to kill both baby and mom if they don't cooperate. In fact, she invites Jessie to die right here and now, by forcing her to fight for her life against Mystery Gambler. For Jessie, this is proving her worth and her importance in being allowed into the bad-guy circle. For Mystery Gambler, it's a step up to a higher ranking of leadership. For President Coroner, it's TV. So they have a monster sword fight ... well, Mystery Gambler has a sword; Jessie has a bamboo stick that proves its power when she somehow shoots fire out the end and totally incinerates the dude. Which is cool by the bad guys, because they already knew MG was a double agent and wanted him dead anyway. And then there's another kid ... this one with a tail ... only instead of a blunt prehensile end, this one has a stinger like a scorpion's. Guess whose kid THIS is.

Back in the real world, Jessie and Jimmy go see her dad, who confirms that there was a mysterious fire on the top floor of the Mandalay Bay the night before, with one fatality. Which ... does this even come close to matching the timeline? How could it have already happened if the day hasn't happened yet? But whatever — the important thing is that the council wants Jessie to accept the bad guys' offer and go live with the baby. The tail-boy is still here, though Jessie's dad says he's riddled with malignant tumors and can't possibly live too much longer. But they realize that if he can tap into those cross-dimensional memories, the way Jessie and Jimmy were doing when they argued about fucking all the way back ... two days ago, then maybe they can use him to triangulate the area where witch-tail-boy lives, presumably with President Coroner. He leads them to a gated community at the base of a mountain, which they figure is good intel to take back to the council even if they're not ready to investigate yet.

Jessie does want to try to find the area where she got dumped and zapped the day she was killed, for ... you know, reasons. She hears cries of pain coming out of the sewer in the general area she thinks it was, and in investigating she runs into the big mean guard from the bad guy meeting. He thinks it's been a waste of time trying to get her on their side and is just about to kill her when the Highlander shows up and unceremoniously lops off his head. He has some more info about what might be going on down here, and it has to do with his dearest and oldest love: that’s right, President Coroner. 

They met in ancient Rome, around the turn of the calendar, but every effort they made to procreate ended in tragedy. One son was killed in battle fighting the Huns, one daughter (and her children) died of the plague, and a final son (who, let it be known, they named HERME) disappeared during the US Revolutionary War. All this loss made the poor woman so bitter and angry that she naturally began striving for control, including supporting Hitler (like, literally helping him) during WWII. The Highlander thinks there's another dimension to her having gone there, though: somehow she can feed off the pain of misery and death, and is addicted to it. Also, it gives her another power of being able to confound people, which the Highlander experienced when trying to reason with her around the time of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion and again when the power baby was kidnapped. Is it helping anybody that he's holding out on the council with this info? 

So he takes Jessie back to the hotel, where she owes her best friend an explanation — only she already knows. Turns out that this dude she's been hooking up with in Vegas is a witch too, and has explained to her the ins and outs and difficulties of what's going on with Jessie, up to a point. Turns out this dude is ALSO a double agent, here supposedly on assignment from the bad guys but just about ready to turn face, at least partly because he's found himself in love with the friend. After two days. His primary power is the ability to change his appearance at will, which Jessie learns in a jarring fashion upon waking up in witch world and finding a tall hunky dude in her suite in place of this pudgy nerd. She has that gene too, he says, and helps her start down the path of disguising herself. She quickly gets good at it and then realizes: couldn't I use this power to sneak into that gated community and steal back my baby?

Obviously it's not going to be so easy as walking into the joint and walking back out with The Special, even disguised as President Coroner as she is. First of all, she doesn't even know for sure that the baby is here now, and she does know that the actual boss is in town, not here. (Lucky thing, right, when she goes through the guard shack in full makeup.) So instead she goes to Jimmy's ex-girlfriend's place. Don't ask me how she knows that THIS is an option, or that the girl is indeed even home, or that she is living there at all. There's not even really a reason to believe that she can help, or that she even KNOWS anything about the baby. But Jessie's concerned about the competition, and fairly confident that her target doesn't have the strength gene and will therefore be easy enough to overpower. It proves true in terms of tying the girl up and throwing her in the trunk of her car, but Jessie isn't counting on being lied to. The ex kicks through the backseat and forces Jessie off the road, where they have an epic Matrix battle that culminates in Jessie punching a hole in the gas tank and exploding the thing with an emergency flare. She feels a surge of pleasure while the ex-girlfriend dies, which is ... creepy? Shows some link to President Coroner? What else does it mean?

It at least means that Jessie should be prepared when she goes to talk to President Coroner tonight. She buys a handgun at a pawn shop, then meets Jimmy James in front of the Tropicana, where the big ugly bodyguard picks them up in a limo. James takes a little while to get in the car, and he doesn't sit right next to Jessie for some reason. The car takes them back to the gated community, to the biggest house, where President Coroner is waiting. Negotiations don't really go as well as could be hoped, since the boss already knows that she's not the one who kidnapped the ex in the trunk of a car. But while they're working out their threats and measuring their dicks, who should walk in but the Highlander. He's finally talked the Tar council into using brain powers to murder his dearest love, and as one person has to be present to make it work, guess who volunteered. Only the big mean bodyguard is holding the baby, and he'll rip her in half if they make a move against his boss. This is a good time for the best friend's boyfriend, the shapeshifting teacher, to appear out of thin air, grab the gun out of Jessie's waistband, and cap the bodyguard in the head. Yeah, he was sitting between them for the whole car ride, like there's not enough seats in a limo for him to stretch out somewhere else. Cockblocker.

But here's the weirdest part: President Coroner recognizes him. That's right, bitches — Herme lives! He has seen the evil his mother is doing and has finally come out of hiding to try to help put a stop to it. And James helped him because he knows what's going on in both worlds. He's experienced it, actually: after Jessie fell asleep, he killed himself (with Herme's help) so he could be fully present and help in witch world. I have more timeline problems and concerns, obviously, starting with the question of how Jimmy could possibly be here today if he hasn't yet killed himself, but that's not where the characters are right now. Right now they're concerned with stopping this ultimate evil who doesn't seem to care about murder. So Herme and his Highlander dad point blue brain lasers at President Coroner, who generates a red bubble to stop them, because everything we have to know about good and evil energy colors we learned from Star Wars.

And now Jessie finds herself inside the red bubble. She's been the most susceptible of those exposed to PC, after all, and so she might be convertible to the pain-suckers. She relives all of the memories that our dear villain has of her children dying and of how the pain could be turned into a pleasurable sensation, and it's just hypnotic enough and convincing enough that, as Jessie finds herself back in her own body, she can be persuaded to take her gun back from Herme and shoot the Highlander. He doesn't die, but he's weakened enough that President Coroner can steal his sword and stab him in the heart.

So now what? Well, it's a good thing Jimmy's here to save everybody! What would we do without a white dude who's barely aware of his powers? But he knows that together, with Jessie and the baby, they have a strength that is impossible to overcome. So they manage to paralyze our villain, but now her scorpion son shows up and wants to murder too. Only — plot twist! — he murders his mom! Turns out that when Jimmy killed himself, he also killed tail-boy in the real world, and now HE'S got good-guy memories. This is really telling about President Coroner's parenting skills that all of her living children not only think that she has to die, but show up to help DO IT.

But now all is good and we can move forward as a family, right? Totally! At least until Jessie wakes up in the real world and finds Jimmy lying beside her, still and cold and dead.

This would have been a good place to stop, right? Of course he doesn't. Two days later, Jessie and her best friend are home from Jimmy's funeral, talking about what's going on and all the implications, when suddenly there's a sound at the door — the mail box. (Does anybody still have one of these shits in 2012? Most rural neighborhoods are going to the community box.) Jessie collects the mail, among which is a red envelope containing a letter from the Alchemist (remember that dude) anticipating a future meeting and sending best wishes from ... President Coroner.

Oh yeah, this thing.

I swear I haven’t forgotten about my goal and my commitment to the project. Other obligations have taken up my creative time, so when I do sit down to write it’s like the last thing I want to do. Still, I’m so close and have come too far to just give up.

Two books left to read. 

Four posts yet to write.

Five weekends in March.