You stay classy, The Last Vampire.
One of my side reads has been Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire. I've talked about Christopher Pike on this blog before as one of my favorite trashy reads, but I decided to reread The Last Vampire precisely because I don't remember it being trashy (except for its fantastic neon-toned, mid-1990s cover!).
Sure, Pike's favorite subjects are vampires and murder and time travel, but I remembered his writing as being creative, surprising, and relentlessly dark. Between the ages of ten and sixteen, I read almost all of his forty-plus novels. But he wasn't my favorite author because he wrote about common horror themes (plenty of writers do that); he was my favorite author because he wrote about these themes with the kind of daring imagination, ruthlessness, and existential angst that I couldn't find anywhere else in the Young Adult section.
Turns out, I still agree with my thirteen-year-old self: The Last Vampire is still a compelling read. Stylistically, it's a strange little book. Pike writes in the voice of Sita, a 5,000-year-old vampire with an insatiable lust for life (and blood--har har!). Her voice in the novel is consistent, unerring, and a little unnerving; its not often that such a violent protagonist is allowed to tell her own tale. The novel also moves extremely quickly: there isn't a spare detail anywhere, and the book reads more like a short story than a full-blown novel.
Yet, in a very small amount of space (less than 200 pages) Pike tells Sita's contemporary story (blackmail, abduction, dynamite, yada yada yada) alongside a vampire creation story. According to Pike's version of vampirism, vampires were created by demonic possession in India 5,000 years ago. They were largely wiped out, however, by the first vampire, who decided to kill them all after he lost a flute-playing competition with Krishna. Yes, that Krishna.
Frieze of Krishna playing his flute.
The Hindu deity is arguably the most important character in this book. Sita spends the novel fighting for her life, but she's also trying to come to terms with her past, her relationship with God, and Krishna's ancient blessing.
Anyway, while the form of the Pike's novels is pretty conventional, his imagination is exceptional. Pike is no Stephanie Meyer, and he doesn't have a damn thing in common with R.L. Stine or J.K. Rowling. He's a different kind of Young Adult novelist: his novels follow groups of dying teenagers in hospice beds and serial killers who converse with giant cockroaches in desert caves. They're more blood-soaked than sugar-coated, and he doesn't shy away from confronting his teenage readers with mortality and insanity and loneliness. And I think that, more than anything else, it's his dark vision of life that makes his novels unique and worth reading.
If you're interested in learning more about Pike, check out Emily Hainsworth's great post on his best novels. I completely agree with her selections, and I love her picture, which I've reposted below: it looks just like my bookshelf circa 1997!
Emily Hainsworth's fantastic Christopher Pike collection.
No comments:
Post a Comment