Perhaps next month I'll read some horse stories written by his sister Mallory. ;)
EvilEva reviews...... Chain Letter by Christopher Pike.
Circa: 1986.
Dissecting The Cover:
Because you can judge a book by its cover!
*The title, Chain Letter, looks like letters cut out of a magazine or newspaper. Like you would do if you were making a ransom note, NOT a chain letter. I've never gotten a ransom note style chain letter before and believe me, I have gotten plenty of chain letters in my day. I have many enemies.
*There's a house and a girl's silhouette in the window, reading her chain letter. I've said this millions of times to people in books, in movies and on TV that are being stalked: Get some blinds! I have blinds. They keep the prying eyes of my many enemies outta my bidness.
*Why'd the Caretaker fuck up the flag on the mailbox? That's just rude.
Lets Review:
Being a teenager is so dope. There are track meets and opening night for the big play and valedictorian speeches to give! Those are the things Alison and her friends are looking forward to senior year.
Oh, except for the fact that someone's going all I Know What You Did Last Summer on their asses.
The ominous Caretaker has sent them, as you may have guessed from the title of this book, a chain letter detailing a task that they each must perform or shit's gonna get serious.
Well some of the gang wanna defy the Caretaker. Fran tries leaving town to get out of doing her assignment. Bad move, Fran. Her ass gets kidnapped.
Kipp, who's a ginormous douchenugget, poo poos the Caretaker's warnings, so his precious car gets ruined and he gets snatched from his bed in the middle of the night.
So, evidently, the Caretaker ain't playing, y'all.
He or she wants Brenda to tell all the teachers to go to hell. Then she or he wants Joan to start a rumor that she's gay. Then he or she wants poor, sick, fragile Neil to burn the whole fucking school down!
But instead Neil's house burns down. While Neil is in it! Neil dies!
But the Caretaker doesn't, uh,... care. She or he just keeps on harassing these teens.
One night, after her parents leave for New York to celebrate their twentieth anniversary/second honeymoon even though two of their daughter's friends have gone missing and one of them was recently burned to a crisp, Alison is left all alone in her home which is part of a housing tract that currently has no other occupants. Oh, and it was a dark and stormy night. Of course it was. So Alison is waiting for Brenda and Joan to show up but guess what!?! If you guessed they got kidnapped before they could make it to Alison's house then you are correct!
So of course the Caretaker goes after Sitting Duck Alison next.
Meanwhile, Tony is taking care of business. He goes to the desert to dig up the shallow grave of the man that they ran over last summer. Yeah. They RAN OVER A MAN LAST SUMMER!!! And they've been keeping it a secret ever since. But the Caretaker knows about their dirty deed. And she or he is gonna exact revenge. In fact, he or she is exacting his or her revenge right now back at Alison's house.
Surprisingly, Alison does something not completely useless and gets her father's gun. And she actually shoots the Caretaker! But she or he gets away before Alison can find out his or her identity.
Now it's Alison's chance to get the fuck up outta here. She dashes to her car but it won't start. Natch.
Then she hears something. It sounds like music. And there's a light on at one of the houses in the tract! Maybe they can help her! So she stupidly runs to the house.
And surprise, surprise. The Caretaker is there.
And it's......
Neil!?!?!
Wait a fucking second! Neil is supposed to be dead!
But no, he's not. He faked his death, like ya do. The charred bones found in Neil's bed were those of the man they ran over last summer! (Which Dumbass Tony is now finding out, having spent all this time digging up an empty grave.)
Turns out Neil has cancer and he's really sick. And he thinks he got cancer because they ran over that dude and didn't report it to the police. Now, I'm no doctor but I'm fairly certain that's not how diseases work but anyway. Neil has everyone but Tony tied up and he's gonna kill them all and himself so they can join that man cos it's what they all deserve or some shit.
Anyhoo, Tony finally figures it all out and makes it to the house just in time. He tries to talk Neil down but Neil is done son. He's eaten up with cancer and guilt and both are killing him. He wants Tony to take him away so he can die, since, you know, everyone else already thinks he is dead.
Alison, Fran, Joan, Brenda and Kipp are freed and go back to life as usual.
Tony comes back after watching Neil die (for reals this time) and buries him where they buried the man that they ran down last summer. Which they still haven't reported. I guess it's a good thing this guy didn't have a family that actually gave a shit about him.
So Tony and Alison get their mack on and no one gets punished for full-on killing that guy and then lying about it for a year and really lying about it still.
Told you. It's so dope to be a teenager.
Say Whaaat!?!:
And the most ridiculous line in the entire book goes to...
Alison for describing the world's weirdest date night EVER:
They planned to go to a movie after dinner but they talked so long over dessert that they missed the last show. They ended up flying a kite in the park across from the school. Alison had never flown a kite at night. You couldn't see the silly thing and knew it was up there somewhere only by the tug on the string. When they were done, Tony simply let it go.Ok, seriously? Who flies a fucking kite on a first date? Question 2: who flies a fucking kite on a first date AT NIGHT? Question 3: when flying a fucking kite on a first date at night, why would you simply let it go when you're done? Seems like a waste of a perfectly good kite to me.
Circa: 1986.
Dissecting The Cover:
*There's an ultra modern house with some chick silhouetted in the window. What's up with Christopher Pike books and their silhouetted chicks in the window?
*There's a raven on the ultra modern post flanking the ultra modern driveway leading to the ultra modern house. That means shit's about to get real so hide your cars, y'all.
*The tagline is...
By Sunday they were just trying to stay alive.Well maybe if y'all would quit poisoning each other your chance of living would go up exponentially.
Lets Review:
It's time for a weekend road trip! Woo-hoo! Friends/enemies/frenemies/exs/couples Shani, Park, Angie, Sol, Kerry, Bert, Flynn and Lena are off to visit Lena's sick sis Robin at their Mexican McMansion. It's gonna be sooooo fun! Surf, sand and Montezuma's Revenge! The gang can't wait. But then, of course, bad shizz starts going down.
First, Sol's crap-ass van gets a flat tire and Park nearly gets bitten by a snake and they meet a creepy shaman dude that tells them a stupid story about birds instead of actually helping them.
Then the garage totally blows the fuck up! While Bert is still in it!
Meanwhile, Robin appears to be getting sicker. Oh noes! Her nurse left this morning and all the cars got blown up. And now it's storming outside. What should we do?
Lets have dinner! Rut row! Someone has poisoned all the dinner guests. They all wake up handcuffed to the floor of the recording studio. Did i mention that Lena and Robin's dad is like some kind of record exec or producer or some shit like that? And that both Lena and Robin are adopted? The last bit will be need-to-know info in a minute. Anyhoodles, so the gang, minus Robin who is upstairs hooked up to her dialysis machine, are all trapped in a room. And in the middle of said room is a box. And in said box is a bunch of snakes.
Suddenly a voice tells them that they best start dishing about what went down Last November or it's gonna get Snakes On A Plane up in this piece.
Here's what happened Last November:
The gang was having a party at Angie's house. And they were totally getting their drank on like nobody's business. Well Robin's a goody-goody, y'all, so it became the groups mission to get her ass wasted. So Robin slams back a glass o' beer. But oh no! It's been POISONED! Someone laced the drink with an insecticide. So now Robin's only got one shitty kidney, she's on dialysis and her life was pretty much ruined Last November.
But the voice already knew this shit. He/she wants to know what exactly went down. She/he wants to know who it was that poisoned Robin. So the teens try to piece together that night when suddenly Not Dead Bert crashes through the door. And now the snakes are loose and Lena gets bitten by one.
The group escapes the recording studio, fetches Robin and hunkers down in another room thinking that some psycho is in the house who wants to know the truth about Last November. Oh and who totes wants to kill them too!
But turns out there wasn't a psycho in the house. It was just Lena. She poisoned them and dragged them downstairs and rigged the snakes and the voice and everything. She wanted her sister's poisoner to confess.
And Flynn wants the same thing. And he's got a gun! So he points the gun at their heads and forces them to remember Last November.
Kerry finally breaks down and confesses that she did it but it was an accident. She was mad at that bitch Lena for stealing her boyfriend, Sol. She was so mad in fact that she accidentally poured a glass of insecticide, mixed it with a beer and let Robin chug it like a champ before she realized "Holy shitballs! I just poisoned someone!"
Flynn is totally gonna shoot Kerry in her face.... if Robin wants him to. Robin gets to choose Kerry's fate, whether she lives another day or gets her brain splattered all over the carpet so Dexter Morgan can fly down and analyze her blood smears.
Well, of course, Robin being such a goody-goody good girl lets Kerry live all because of the dumbass bird story her shaman friend told her.
Then we find out Flynn gave such a shit about Robin because she's his biological sister! He found out about her from their bio-mom, searched for her, found out she needed a kidney transplant, and is now contemplating whether to give her one of his awesome nonsuckish kidneys. And because of Robin's goody goodness of not wanting to be a murderess and all, Flynn (whose actual name is Michael, he was using an alias this whole time for a really stupid reason.) has decided that he will gift Robin with one of his fully functioning kidneys. So all is forgiven! Hooray!
But wait. Park wants to know why he still feels like tee totes shizz. It's because Flynn has been poisoning them... with the Mexican water! It hasn't been filtered all weekend. Now the gang can enjoy massive bouts of diarrhea for the rest of the trip! What a great souvenir!
Say Whaaat!?!:
And the most ridiculous line in the entire book goes to...
Shani, with this disgusting gem about her current ass situation:
Ordinarily she had a nervous stomach, but this was ridiculous. She sat grimacing on the toilet, worried that she would vomit on top of her diarrhea.Um. Eww Shani. I realize this book was written in the 80s but here in the 2000s that's what we like to call TMI.
There was also this little nugget, which kinda leads me to believe that Christopher Pike might be racist towards Mexicans. This is how he describes a snake attack. Sol, who is Mexican, is trying to kill a snake that is inches away from biting the very white Park:
Sol whipped down his stone with a force sufficient to crack the miserable road. But the snake had only been baiting him. This was Mexico; it wanted a Mexican.So this snake has race-specific taste buds? That's weird.
You know, I've noticed something in these Christopher Pike books, whenever these teens do something bad i.e. are involved in a hit and run or poisoning someone to the point of kidney failure, they don't have to deal with any kind of consequences. No one went to prison. Hell, no one even went to juvie. Even further hell, no one even got stuck with community service.
I bet Lindsey Lohan wishes she lived in a world created by Christopher Pike. Then instead of having an alcohol monitoring bracelet and being on house arrest, she could be hooking up under the bleachers with the cutest guy in school.
Well that's all the Christopher Pike-y goodness I have for you right now. Check back cos I'll also be reviewing Master of Murder and Scavenger Hunt soon.
