Christopher Pike is an American author of, primarily, teen thriller and horror titles. He was most popular in the 1980s and 1990s, moving on to publishing adult works in the 2000s.
Not to be confused with the Star Trek character, although that's actually where he got the pseudonym; the author's real name is Kevin McFadden, born November 12, 1954.
Works by Christopher Pike with their own pages include:
- Weekend (1986)
- Chain Letter (1986)
- Remember Me (1989 - 1995)
- Witch (1990)
- The Season of Passage (1992)
- The Last Vampire (1994 - 2013)
- Spooksville (1995 - 1998)
Adaptations of works by Christopher Pike with their own pages include:
Tropes in his other works include:
- Accidental Murder: Roxanne accidentally pushed Pepper onto a pitchfork in Whisper of Death. Subverted near the end though.
- Alas, Poor Villain: Nell in Slumber Party.
- Alone with the Psycho: In the novel Falling, FBI agent Kelly Feinman thinks she has tracked down the Acid Man serial killer, Michael Grander. She goes to interview Michael's university professor, Gene Banks, to get background info to support her case on Michael. All the while she has kept her insights secret from the rest of the FBI. Professor Banks invites her to his apartment to supply information on Michael. While there, Kelly deduces Banks is the Acid Man and had all along planned to frame Michael. Banks holds her hostage and pours acid on her, with the FBI none the wiser.
- Ambiguous Innocence: Young Betty Sue in Whisper of Death liked to put butterflies in jars. She poked holes in the lids, but the butterflies would die anyway because of the sun heating up the air in the jars. Betty Sue states that the butterflies have no idea they are in jars because they can still see everything, and just fly around in circles until they die.
- Alice in Gimme a Kiss kills two people, and tries to kill Jane as well, because Alice had kissed Kirk and got a cold sore from him - which she knows is caused by the same virus as herpes. Because of her controlling father, she is so ignorant of sex that now she believes she has an STI, even though she and Kirk didn't actually sleep together.
- Antivillain: Mary Blanc in Monster. She murders two people with a shotgun and intended to kill more at a party. Mary does this because she knew that the three in question were transforming into inhuman monsters that devour human flesh, and had already killed a small group of people before the book began.
- Arc Words:
- The term "starlight crystal" is the title of one of Pike's novels (but it isn't used anywhere in story), the title of a story in the last Remember Me book, and is a term Sati uses to describe herself as in Sati.
- MAZE in Magic Fire. Mark is told that it's a drug. In a way, it is.
- Artistic License – Geography: The Secret of Ka portrays Istanbul as the capital of Turkey, which it isn't
. - Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The final fate of Paige (and possibly Tem) in The Starlight Crystal.
- Author Appeal:
- Significant green-eyed redheads. Extra points if their eyes are described as "emerald" or a similar shade. It's easier to count every example of an attractive character without those traits.
- Big breasts. Pike usually has at least one supporting cast member (never a lead) with exceptionally big breasts, large enough for the POV character to comment on (and may come with either Breast Envy or D-Cup Distress by proxy). Curiously, Pike rarely uses big breasts as a strict indication of attractiveness, though they tend to be the first thing discussed whenever the characters that have them are mentioned.
- Bad Future:
- The Eternal Enemy focuses on a future where most of humanity is transformed into robots.
- See You Later focuses on the main character discovering the guy who is currently dating the woman he loves will eventually become a bloodthirsty war monger who has most of Earth stuck in a horrible war sure to wipe out humanity.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Whisper of Death ends with the very strong implication that Betty Sue's going to torment Pepper and the others even if Roxanne escaped.
- Batman Gambit: Fall Into Darkness. Ann figured that, even if Sharon wasn't convicted of her supposed murder, the shame of having been arrested and tried for murder would be enough to ruin Sharon's life.
- Bittersweet Ending: This is a reoccurring trend in Pike's books. Usually, the heroine will wind up dying or suffering A Fate Worse Than Death to achieve some greater good.
- In Monster, Angela Warner has fully become one of the monsters, but has retained enough sense to know that "people are not for eating", and manages to destroy the lake which is the cause of the transformations by causing an oil spill that becomes a fire.
- Break the Haughty: Ilonka goes through this in The Midnight Club. Granted, she's sick and she's dying, but the way she keeps believing that it absolutely has to be her that is going to live when she hears rumors of someone at the hospice being misdiagnosed, it makes her come across as inconsiderate to the rest of the kids. Then she finds out no, it wasn't her, it's Sandra. And beyond that, she's not getting better. Her illness has advanced so far she only has weeks.
- Break Them by Talking: How Clyde brings down Susan in the climax of Last Act.
- Brought Down to Normal: An ancient Greek goddess in The Immortal and her Arch-Enemy are turned mortal as a punishment, they turn into the heroine (and her best friend respectively) who gain Past-Life Memories as a result.
- Bury Your Gays:
- The Midnight Club ends with one of the club being revealed as both gay and dying of AIDS. It's Spence, who also reveals on his deathbed he unintentionally gave the disease to his boyfriend Carl and didn't realize what he'd done until it was too late.
- Cain and Abel:
- Robin and Lena Carlton have this dynamic from an outsider's perspective, Lena being the Alpha Bitch Cain while Robin's the demure Abel. It turns out the two are actually both Abel, because Lena is devoted to her sister and would do anything to protect her.
- Nell and Nicole Kutroff of Slumber Party, where Nicole is the Abel and Nell is Cain, bitter about the burn scars on her face and how her sister, while needing to wear long sleeved clothes, can at least interact with people without getting stared at. Nell manipulates her sister into helping her stage the murder of the girls involved with the fire until Nicole turns on her and Nell attempts to kill her as well.
- Charm Person: Betty Sue in Whisper of Death, with the implications that she may or may not have enchanted a classmate to actually rape her.
- Chivalrous Pervert:
- Bubba in the Final Friends series.
- Kevin in Monster.
- Ed in The Eternal Enemy.
- Contrived Coincidence: Things consistently work out for Mark and Jessa in Magic Fire, starting from Mark easily destroying a security system to burn down a house, to stealing a fuel truck to create a massive fire that would destroy Pacific Palisades, to hijacking two alien bodies, stealing a military ship, and heading back to Earth. Lampshaded when Mark realizes there's no way everything could've worked out that easily for both of them, and this allows him to remember the two of them are in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
- Cool Big Sis:
- Jennifer to Ken (who prefers Gator) in The Lost Mind. Even losing her memory couldn't stop Jen from loving Gator.
- Lena Carlton to Robin, adoption be damned. Lena has always loved her sister and is willing to go to extremes to figure out who poisoned Robin and make that person suffer.
- Covers Always Lie: The Starlight Crystal features the cover image of a giant silver hourglass, decorated with jewels in a rainbow pattern, containing skulls and bones that turn into stars in its bottom half. No such hourglass appears anywhere in the story. In fact, the term "starlight crystal" isn't used anywhere at all in the book.
- Deconstruction: Magic Fire comes across as Pike deconstructing many of the reoccurring elements in his novels by adding them all together in one book before the end reveals everything that occurred was in the fantasy world of a dying drug addict.
- Despair Event Horizon: In Road to Nowhere, John crosses it when he sees Candy, his high school sweetheart, in the arms of another man.
- Doomed Protagonist: The Midnight Club. That's sort of the point, as the main characters are all teenagers with incurable diseases living in a hospice. Well, one of them turns out to have been misdiagnosed, but it's not the main character.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Played with. In Whisper Of Death, Helter raped Betty Sue. But no one is able to figure out if Betty Sue made him do it, or if she attempted to and he caught her by surprise. It's still treated as heinous however you look at it.
- Downer Ending:
- Magic Fire: Jessa refuses to leave her dreamworld and Mark's poor attempt at saving her only caused them both suffering.
- Dream Land:
- Seen multiple times in Remember Me when Shari attempts to invade the dreams of her friends so as to find out which one of them killed her. Also, the moment when she saves her brother's life, which she had dreamed about beforehand.
- Last Act features Melanie encountering Rindy in a dream where she spells out a rather Significant Anagram regarding the author of the play they were in.
- Dream Within a Dream: Magic Fire takes place within an extensive Lotus-Eater Machine being generated by an unconscious woman's brain. The main character and her are capable of dreaming within this dream world.
- Entertainingly Wrong: In Master of Murder, Shelly thought Marvin killed Harry and was manipulating him the whole time in order to expose him. Marvin had absolutely nothing to do with it, and to make matters worse Shelly had been working with Triad, the guy who actually killed Harry. Shelly deduced Marvin was responsible after seeing the similarities between Harry's death and the main death in Marvin's book series. It turns out Marvin had only subconsciously patterned the books after what happened to Harry, but figuring out the truth allowed him to overcome his writer's block and use it to write the last book in the series.
- Evil Redhead: Betty Sue from Whisper of Death, who appears to be some sort of godlike entity capable of casually giving people terminal illnesses for catching her ire.
- Fair-Play Whodunnit: A few, though Last Act is probably the purest example.
- Faking the Dead:
- Falling.
- Chain Letter (1986): Neal fakes their death via The Caretaker to throw the others off the scent.
- Slumber Party (Nicole/Celeste), wherein everyone was told Nicole died from her injuries when instead she changed her name to Celeste and went to live with her aunt.
- Weekend had an unintentional example with Bert, whom everyone assumed was obliterated in the garage explosion. He simply got caught in a riptide and got lost trying to find his way back to the house.
- Gimme a Kiss (Jane).
- Scavenger Hunt (Joe/Tom).
- Fall Into Darkness had Ann, who fakes her death as part of a revenge scheme.
- Fetus Terrible:
- The Grave was about a young woman who is impregnated by one of The Undead and killed by being dumped in a freezer. She becomes one of the undead herself and it is revealed that the fetus she is carrying was specifically bred by a Mad Scientist to become the antichrist. But by the end it's revealed the Mad Scientist has failed, the Fetus Terrible being more a balance between good and evil who destroys the Mad Scientist and goes on his merry way. Oh, and this book was aimed at teenagers. Really.
- The Cold One.
- Gaslighting: The ending of Slumber Party reveals Nell's been doing this to Nicole since the fire that scarred both of them. Nell's spent years convincing Nicole that Lara and the others never wanted Nicole at the slumber party and deliberately tried to kill her by dousing her in gasoline and setting her on fire. It was easy for Nell to reinforce this on Nicole because Lara and Dana only knew her as "Celeste" and never talked about the fire simply because they didn't see the need to. When Nell finally enacts her plan to get revenge on the girls, Lara's able to make Nicole realize how ridiculous it would be to think her family kept gasoline in their living room and clarifies she poured brandy on Nicole. Nicole still burned, but Lara did it because it was wet and didn't stop to think the alcohol would burn.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Betty Sue's alter ego Queen Beetle from her disturbing short stories.
- Gone Horribly Right: Gimme A Kiss, where the faked death gambit works so well someone used to murder somebody else for real.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Played with in Whisper of Death, where the plot kicks off after Roxanne decides to have an abortion only to return home with Pepper to discover everyone in town is gone except for Leslie, Stan, and Helter. The events are happening while Roxanne's bleeding to death during her abortion procedure, thanks to a spell case by Betty Sue. Roxanne chooses to stay on the table and follow through with the procedure, dying but breaking Betty Sue's spell. Roxanne is unequivocally portrayed as one of the few genuinely decent characters in the cast, and decided to have the abortion simply because she's not ready to be a mom.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars:
- Used in Slumber Party. Nell's scars are only on her face, and aren't as severe as Nicole's. Nicole's face is bare of any scars, but the damage is more prevalent on her torso and lower body. She doesn't even have nipples or a belly button anymore, and alludes that the damage is much worse below the belt. Nell is the truly bloodthirsty one, whereas Nicole does a Heel–Face Turn because Nell had been lying to her about the accident.
- Shena in The Star Group is introduced with a badly scarred face after getting sprayed with battery acid which was not immediately wiped off. Gale did this on purpose to set up Shena as a scapegoat when she finally made her move.
- Grand Theft Me:
- The Immortal and The Blind Mirror use this trope as a twist - without the transferred soul initially remembering their true identity.
- In Spellbound, how Josies' soul came to be infused with that of a vulture.
- Groin Attack: The "Holt Skater" story in Whisper of Death has the imagery of Holt walking on a wall that proceeds to get narrower with each step he takes, until it finally becomes like a knife and he's cut in half vertically, balls first. Helter accidentally shoots himself in the groin, and Roxanne has to perform a Mercy Kill on him.
- Handicapped Badass: Clyde in Last Act. Not in the sense that he's able to beat somebody up effortlessly despite having lost the use of his legs and right arm, but in the fact that his mere presence makes Susan Trels go white as a sheet. He's then able to verbally break down her entire Motive Rant about why she killed Rindy, why she hated Rindy, and turns her from a haughty villainess to a pathetic wretch. Which is really all Susan was to begin with.
- Hannibal Lecture: In Falling, the Acid Killer, Gene Banks, has a way of turning the tables on FBI agent Kelly Feinman. Even after Kelly has caught and made him a quadriplegic, she finds herself drawn to him and the revelations he provides her about her character. Pike has stated he owes a debt to Silence of the Lambs, and a character in Falling name-checks Hannibal Lecter.
- Hope Spot: The Eternal Enemy. This would actually be a subversion, given that Christopher, as an old man, remembered Rela in the future, which could've meant the book was a Stable Time Loop. However, when Rela views the recording of her death when Christopher is at her house, the footage temporarily changed to feature Christopher's death. Which means that Christopher's vow to never become like Rela's grandfather isn't so futile.
- I Did What I Had to Do: Mary Blanc in Monster feels absolutely no guilt for killing Todd and Kathy, nor does she feel guilty for trying to kill Jim. Because she was absolutely justified in doing it when Angela realizes that, yes, they were monsters.
- It's All About Me: Gale in The Star Group is revealed to be one of the negative beings mentioned by Mentor as only being interested in their hungers and desires at the expense of others.
- Jerk Jock
- Mitch in The Lost Mind. He's Jennifer's boyfriend, as well as a chronic gambler who uses Jen to cover his debts with about as much compassion as a rock. When he comes to Jen's house to get the money he needs to pay off a loan shark, his next move is to strip completely naked and sprawl himself out on her bed, thinking some quick sex will help her relax after Crystal's death is made public. Jen is... less than pleased.
- Subverted with Tony in Chain Letter. People are always telling him what an amazing football player he is and he's the best of Grant High's team, but he actually hates football and doesn't get along with his teammates because they have nothing in common. Unfortunately, he realizes that he does have something of an ego, and said ego blinded him to Neil's feelings because he's so used to enabling Neil's Hero Worship.
- Averted with Jimmy in The Star Group. Jimmy's pretty nice, but he has issues with Gale over her scarring.
- Kill It with Fire:
- In Monster, Angela Warner kills her turned classmates by blowing up her house, then after she fully loses her human appearance, retains enough sense of self to cause an oil spill into the lake responsible for the transformations and sets it on fire.
- In The Star Group, Shena used her pyrokinesis to destroy Daniel's house after Gale had forced Daniel to kill himself. Shena savored hearing Gale scream from inside.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: The Lost Mind. Jennifer's memory loss is so absolute, the person she is when she wakes up is pretty much entirely a brand new human being. She's never getting those memories back.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Discussed in The Midnight Club. Anya believes the cancer which is slowly killing her and has already claimed her right leg is punishment for destroying her relationship with her boyfriend Bill, by sleeping with another guy for no reason. What adds to this belief is the fact that Bill broke the clay statue of two lovers Anya was making for him, and only the right leg was broken. It's somehow repaired, as if it had never been broken, when Bill comes to claim Anya's things.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: The ending of Magic Fire reveals the entire book took place inside an illusion world generated by a machine hooked up to Jessa Charm's brain.
- Love Makes You Evil:
- Last Act. Susan killed Rindy out of revenge for crippling Clyde, only for Clyde to reveal he caused the car accident and Rindy chose to become The Scapegoat on purpose so Clyde's family would sue Rindy's parents to pay for his medical treatments.
- Remember Me. Shari's killer was driven insane when she learned the boy she loved was her biological brother separated at birth.
- Mama Bear: Mrs. Trasker in Die Softly. When she sees photographs of Alexa killing her son Herb, she punches Alexa in the face and then spits on her before Alexa is arrested.
- Mercy Kill: Whisper of Death. Roxanne has to shoot Helter to put him out of his misery after he accidentally shoots himself in the groin and slowly starts to die from blood loss.
- The Mole: In The Star Group one of the teenagers is actually planning to kill the rest. It's Gale.
- The Movie: Fall Into Darkness was adapted into a made-for-TV movie.
- Mythology Gag:
- In The Star Group, main character Daniel mentions he's writing a story where the protagonist has just set a giant fire in Los Angeles. He's essentially writing Magic Fire.
- Roxanne and Pepper see The Season of Passage in Whisper of Death.
- In one of the Remember Me sequels, Shari begins writing The Starlight Crystal.
- The Listeners is mentioned in the second part of the "Collect Call" short story.
- Near-Death Clairvoyance: Killed at a party, Shari Cooper spends the remainder of Remember Me as a ghost, watching over friends/family and trying to figure out who murdered her.
- New Age: Many of Pike's science fiction and fantasy novels are based on (or take cues from) New Age concepts and beliefs. A number of plots center around Ancient Egyptian and Eastern mysticism, extraterrestrials, transmigration of the soul, and humans evolving into gods (or gods taking human form).
- Nice Girl: Jean from Bury Me Deep. One character straight up tells her she's nice and asks if anyone has told her before, to which she replies "no, most people I know think I'm a complete bitch"
- Noodle Incident: In Whisper of Death, Betty Sue's diary mentions somebody named "Fat Freddy" whom she claims to have destroyed for thinking he was greater than the person who created him. There's no information given as to who or what Fat Freddy was, or what Betty Sue would do with him or how she destroyed him.
- Our Vampires Are Different: In The Season of Passage and Monster the vampires originate from Mars, people on Earth being infected by a virus from that planet — thereby suggesting that either they are not set in the same universe as The Last Vampire series, or that the two types of vampires are simply unaware of each other's existence (as they never seem to cross paths).
- Out-Gambitted
- Used in Weekend. Lena purposefully gave the wrong date on the invitations but made sure those who were at the party where Robin drank insect poison came, with the intent to discover who actually gave Robin the poison. She drugs them, locks them in a room (herself included) filled with venom-less rattlesnakes, and uses a recording of her dubbed voice to interrogate them. She hadn't expected on A: Bert turning up alive after everyone believed he was killed in the garage explosion, and B: the group bringing Flynn, who reveals himself to be Robin's biological brother Michael. He planned to figure out who poisoned Robin himself, but at the same time to determine if he felt comfortable enough to give Robin one of his kidneys for a transplant. He wasn't going to just give an organ to a complete stranger, especially a sister he never even knew existed until just recently.
- Happens to the Caretaker twice in Chain Letter 2: The Ancient Evil. Joan's task is to give Tony a loaded gun and Brenda's severed finger. Tony's task is to blow Alison's brains out. What the Caretaker did not expect would be that A: Alison would take the choice from Tony and shoot herself so he wouldn't have to, and B: that Joan would give Tony a gun filled with blanks.
- Parody Sue: The character of Melissa in the Final Chance play from Last Act. She's Susan Trels' stand-in, but with a name deliberately meant to be similar to Melanie's in order to shape her into The Scapegoat.
- Playing with Fire:
- Lara in Slumber Party starts to believe someone in their group is either pyrokinetic or if it's the case of Spontaneous Human Combustion, in order to explain how these fires keep occurring. It turns out she's wrong on both accounts, and Nell was secretly goading her beliefs just to screw with her.
- Magic Fire naturally deals with a young pyromaniac who later discovers his family has a genetic ability to generate flames with their minds. Except he doesn't and he only had pyrokinesis in the dream world.
- Shena in The Star Group develops pyrokinetic abilities as the group begin to gain new abilities from their collective awakening.
- Poor Communication Kills:
- Last Act. Susan killed Rindy out of revenge for Clyde getting crippled, not knowing Rindy let everyone blame her for Clyde's accident when it was Clyde's fault the whole time.
- Sati. The titular character dies when someone mistakenly assumes she can drink poison without being affected, and gives her a tainted drink to test her.
- Reasonable Authority Figure:
- Monster has Lieutenant Nguyen, who personally investigates Mary Blanc's murders and her claims about the group of people that were supposedly eaten by Jim and the other two. He takes Mary and Angela seriously even if they don't realize he's investigating them.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: In Chain Letter, Brenda's tasks from the Caretaker involve insulting her teachers. Her first task has her telling the drama teacher he's the worst director in the world, and for the second she needs to tell every teacher to go to hell individually. Both times she gets a bit too into it, and during the second task she basically starts an in-class revolt against a particularly nasty English teacher.
- Recycled Script:
- Weekend and Slumber Party are both about a group of friends spending the weekend in some isolated location, and both groups share a dark secret from their past involving a former friend who was badly injured. The villain of the book is revealed to be someone out for revenge.
- Gimme a Kiss and Fall into Darkness both feature a girl who decides to set up someone else for her murder, and then things go horribly wrong and people start dying for real. Partially justified by the implication that Ann, the girl in Fall into Darkness, has read Gimme a Kiss and got the idea from there.
- Red Pill, Blue Pill: In Magic Fire there is a drug that takes you into a Matrix-esque reality that is extremely addictive. Despite Jessa (main character) being informed she is living in a fantasy world, she refuses to wake from her coma (and stop her addiction).
- Rewriting Reality:
- In Master of Murder, an author names his characters after his friends, and then the fanfics become canon (i.e., they happen in Real Life). Hilarity doesn't exactly ensue, being a Pike novel.
- In Whisper of Death, the main characters discover that a dead classmate had written stories about them using slightly different names, and each one dies as the characters in the story.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Played with in The Midnight Club when Ilonka scares off Kevin's healthy girlfriend Kathy. Ilonka shatters Kathy's belief that Kevin will recover and come home, explaining he's in a hospice because he's going to die and for his sake she needs to stop being so oblivious. Ilonka genuinely feels awful for doing this, because even if everyone else states Kathy needed a wake-up call, Ilonka replies she only did it because she wants Kevin for herself.
- The Scapegoat: In The Star Group, Gale set Shena up as this by deliberately scarring her and feigning innocence. She then set Sal up as Jimmy's murderer by saying so to the police, leading to Sal getting shot in the back.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: At the very end of Master of Murder, once the truth comes out about Triad killing Harry and how Shelly manipulated Marvin thinking he killed Harry, Marvin decides to leave Shelly at Triad's mercy on the bridge. The way he sees it, Marvin has no reason to help Shelly and figures if Triad kills her he'll be screwed anyway. He departs by hinting Shelly can figure a way out by herself, and it turns out she somehow killed Triad after Marvin left to finish his novel.
- Self-Serving Memory: In Last Act. Final Chance was nothing more than Susan Trels' warped memory of what her friendship with Rindy and Clyde was like. Clyde himself calls Susan out on on her bullshit by saying her play was garbage compared to how things actually happened. This contributes to Susan's mental breakdown.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
- See You Later involves some time travelers that are trying to change the past in order to keep a guy from destroying the world through nuclear war.
- The Eternal Enemy.
- She's All Grown Up: Leslie Bell in Whisper of Death was not as pretty as a child as she was a teenager. In fact, Helter mentions she was so ugly he used to throw rocks at her. It's all but outright confirmed Betty Sue is the reason she became so beautiful.
- Significant Anagram: Last Act features a play written by the murderer, Susan Trels, solely to set up the murder; the pseudonym she uses as playwright, Stan Russel, (deliberately, as dramatic flair and a challenge) is an anagram of her name.
- Silent Scapegoat: Rindy in Last Act. Clyde was the actual driver the night of the crash, but Rindy took the blame so his parents could sue her very rich family to cover his medical bills and recovery.
- Slut-Shaming: A plot point in Gimme a Kiss where Jane writes a sexual fantasy about a popular boy as an entry in her diary - written as if it actually happened. The diary gets circulated around school, and no one believes Jane that she made the whole thing up, causing her to decide to fake her own death to get back at the culprits.
- Spanner in the Works: Joan in the second Chain Letter book. When she's told that her task is to give Tony a loaded gun, which he's then told he must use to kill Alison, Joan realized nothing good would come of giving the gun to Tony but fearing death, she gave him a gun that was filled with blanks. Joan saved Alison and Tony's lives which is especially ironic because she's particularly bitter towards them and she was Demoted to Extra in this book.
- Stable Time Loop: The events that occur in The Starlight Crystal are revealed to have been set up by none other than Paige Christian herself, who lives past the death of the universe and well into its rebirth. She discovers upon experience that she was really the woman who convinced her to visit a nearby park, where she would meet the love of her life, and was also responsible for creating the alien race that would wipe out all life on Earth, on purpose.
- Star-Crossed Lovers: John and Candy aka Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn in Road to Nowhere: two high school sweethearts who are forced to go their separate ways after John loses his temper and assaults their teacher. John later loses two fingers in a work accident and becomes a heroin addict to cope with the pain, while Candy becomes a single mother. When they finally meet again, Candy witnesses John robbing a store to fund his addiction, and he ends up killing her before committing Suicide by Cop.
- Story Within a Story:
- Weekend. Robin shares a folk tale about three birds and a snake, which is disturbingly reminiscent of the conflict between Robin, Lena, Flynn, and whoever poisoned Robin.
- Last Act. There's the "Final Chance" script Melanie and the rest of the characters act out.
- The Midnight Club. Several stories are shared in detail during the club's meetings.
- Whisper of Death. Roxanne and the others read out four odd short stories written by Betty-Sue, and soon they begin to die as the characters in the tales do.
- Remember Me 3. Only the story turns out to be none other than The Starlight Crystal.
- Master of Murder. There are brief snippets of Marvin's novels shown.
- Road to Nowhere. Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn share with Teresa the tragic tale of John and Candy, a.k.a. their life story.
- Thanatos Gambit: Fall into Darkness. Ann fakes her death to get revenge on Sharon for her brother's suicide.
- That Man Is Dead: Played with in The Lost Mind. Jennifer doesn't actually die physically, but she has completely and utterly lost her entire sense of self and memory to the point that, when she awakens in the story's beginning, the person she used to be has for all intents and purposes died.
- This Is My Story:
- Shari in Remember Me, particularly the last lines of the book.
- Rela in The Eternal Enemy.
- Paige in The Starlight Crystal.
- Roxanne in Whisper of Death.
- Time Dilation: The crews of The Traveler and The Pandora in The Starlight Crystal, by means of traveling at the speed of light and cryogenic freezing respectively, live so long into the future that the Earth is rendered a lifeless, radioactive wasteland, and by the time they return the radiation has since abated. Paige Christian, however, lives so long that she witnesses all life in the universe die out, then its rebirth. She then returns to Earth under a different identity, right at the same time her previous self was planning on leaving Earth to become a member of The Traveler.
- Token Shipping: Sal and Terri in The Star Group.
- Trapped-with-Monster Plot: In Whisper of Death, the five kids are trapped in the town and get killed by Betty Sue one by one. When two of them try to escape via a car, a storm springs up making it impossible to proceed. It clears up instantly when they turn around.
- The Vamp: Many of Pike's female characters are explicitly described as not being total knockouts, but what they lack in physical appearance is made up for in terms of sensuality and body language. Notable examples include Jessa in Magic Fire and Gale in The Star Group.
- Vegetarian Vampire: In Monster most of the vampires kill for blood. However Angela Warner, by the end of the novel, learns to avoid humans and will only kill animals.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Mary Blanc in Monster is totally willing to take matters into her own hands and kills Todd and Kathy in front of dozens of witnesses.
- Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Rela in The Eternal Enemy. Rela is short for Robotic Experimentation Logistical Algorhythm.
- Xanatos Gambit: The premise of the original Chain Letter and the Caretaker's overall plan for the group. As it's pointed out, the seven kids can either go through with the tasks and do something degrading and humiliating, or they can be punished if they don't follow through. And if they try to tell anyone about the Caretaker, he'll expose the death of the man last summer, but even telling someone about the man would have the same end result. They're screwed no matter what they do.
- Yandere: Jessa in Magic Fire. She's consistently trying to keep Mark all to herself, and presses Mark to ensure no one gets between their attempts to be together. It turns out the entire novel up until the epilogue has been Jessa's prolonged dream thanks to a Lotus-Eater Machine. Mark was trying to get her to come back to the waking world, only to have his memories rewritten by Jessa's subconscious and forgetting what he was supposed to be doing. It was only after he realized how simplistic Jessa's dreamworld was and the subsequent pattern of it being just the two of them that he remembered his true purpose. Only Jessa wouldn't go with him.
