Spellbound: Christopher Pike Is Wilder Than I Remembered!

As I read this book, I remembered that our teacher read this book to the class in 5th grade. The 80s were wild, man!

[There are spoilers ahead. The book is 40 years old. If you haven't read it by now, I have to assume you won't. Have fun!]

I've been enjoying reading some of the books from my youth, but R. L. Stine wasn't the only YA author that kept me captivated as a kid. I was also a fan of Christopher Pike; in fact, I think I discovered Pike before I picked up my first Fear Street book. I decided to start with Spellbound. I'm pretty sure this book was my first experience with Pike, and it wasn't one I read on my own - our fifth grade teacher actually read it to the class during our daily story time!

I remember there was one day that she said she was going to skip a part, and if we wanted to know what happened we would have to read it on our own. I'm pretty sure it was a moment where two characters almost had sex, and trigger warning, but it also bordered on turning into a scene of sexual assualt. I can understand not reading that to 5th graders, but the fact that she didn't have any qualms about reading any of the many descriptions of murder and mayhem perfectly the 80s attitudes towards sex and violence.

Spellbound picks up a couple of months after the death of Karen Holly in the sleepy town of Timber, Wyoming. Cindy Jones is the new girlfriend of Jason Thompson, Karen's boyfriend who claims that Karen was killed by a bear, though he himself is also under investigation. And Cindy is just, you know, fine with that.

Cindy's brother Alex, a track and field star, has the hots for Joni Harper, Karen's former best friend. It's clear he only likes her because she is hot, because any time Cindy describes her, she uses words like, "lifeless eyes," "flat personality," "cold," etc. But this was the 80s and being hot was enough, because Cindy also pressures Alex into asking her out. Alex has a big race the same day that Jason has a big football game, and they all decide to go out afterwards. Also invited are Cindy's best friend Pam (who was also Karen's cousin) and the foreign exchange student that is living in Pam's house, Bala.

Before we go any further, let me just say that Bala's portrayal in the book is...questionable. He is a key figure in the mystery that we will talk about later (and spoil, so be warned), but he's also almost fetishized. Cindy goes on and on about his height, how athletic he is, and is fascinated that he is the grandson of his village's shaman; besides the constant references to his dark skin and his height (there is a lot of focus on his "size," which again feels a little fetish-y), he is very much a character in the tradition of the Magical Negro trope.

When talking to the class, he tells a story about his grandfather using a shamanstic ritual to allow humans to enter the bodies of animals (which everyone in the class, including the teacher, just seems to accept as factual) and expereince the world through their eyes. Hmmm, I wonder if that will end up being important later?

Strangely, Jason insists that they all go up to Castle Park, the site where Karen was killed "by a bear," and no one finds this at all strange or ghoulish. While there, Cindy falls into the river and both Jason and Bala attempt to rescue her before she can plunge to her death over Crystal Falls.

No, not those Crystal Falls. The Crystal Falls where Karen's body was dumped...by the bear that attacked her? The idea that Karen died in an animal attack is pretty implausible from the beginning, since the body was dumped in the river, went over the falls, and found like a half mile away. I'm no zoologist, but I'm pretty sure bears aren't known for disposing of bodies, but sure, let's all go up to the site of her death 7 weeks later for a fun after school hang. What we're learning about Cindy and her friends is that they are way too trusting, and too quick to accept Jason's explanation for what transpired. But then again, Jason's dad is the rich mayor of the town, and pretty much everyone else is also trusting, except for local reporter Kent Cooke who keeps publishing articles with not so subtle insinuations that maybe Jason had more to do with Karen's death than he's letting on.

Fast forward a bit, and we have some budding teen romance, Jason is pretty much a rich entitled asshole the entire time, and Joni is still weird as fuck, but that somehow doesn't stop either Alex or his friend Ray from the track team from being totally obsessed with her. Ray is Pam's ex-boyfriend and a bit of a player, and though he wants to get back together with Pam he decides to try to get it on with Joni before he does, even though he has already seen Alex and Joni going out. After all, Joni called him and asked him out, so all is fair in love and war, right?

So...Ray dies. Similar circumstances and injuries to Karen. Not at all suspicious, right?

Cindy decides to go up to the park to do a little investigating and she finds that where she fell into the river, someone had put oil on the rock path to make her slip (would that even work?) and sawed off the branch she had tried to grab for safety, which broke off and sent her into the river. She also finds that the large branch that Jason had tried to hang from to pull her out of the water has been reinforced, and there was a rope attached to keep him from falling in with her. Clearly Jason set up this whole situation so that he could look like a hero before the big hearing where the DA was going to decide whether or not to pursue charges.

Obviously, he's the killer right? Cindy thinks so, and she goes to the hearing pretending that she will be a character witness, but instead reveals the whole staged rescue scenario to a shocked courtroom. It's looking bleak for Mr. Thompson; it seems maybe Daddy's money might not be enough to get his out of this jam.

But in a not-entirely-shocking twist, just being a rich asshole doesn't automatically make one a murderer and the real culprit is revealed to be Joni. When Bala hears about Ray's death, he gives Cindy a cryptic warning to tell Alex to stay far away from Joni before getting a gun out of his host family's basement and going off to find Joni. When he shows up badly injured a little later on, requiring emergency surgery, Cindy is almost able to put the pieces together on her own, but still needs to wait for Bala to wake up to fill in the gaps.

Part of Joni's weirdness is attempted to be explained away by her aunt, who she lives with. Both of her parent are dead, and her brother is..."still in England." Joni's aunt is a little scattered, but also a little racist: she let's slip to Alex that she's nervous about Joni hanging around with Bala, because she's already had a run-in with "that kind" before.

It turns out that run in what when Joni's parents, researchers working on a project in Africa, had come to Bala's village. Joni struck up a friendship with Bala's granfather, the shaman, and insisted that he let her be a part of the transference ritual with an animal. The grandfather agrees, and captures a vulture. As the ritual is taking place, the vulture panics and breaks loose, flying to a nearby village where Joni's parents are having lunch. Joni's father shoots the vulture, and Joni is left comatose.

As it turns out, Joni's spirit died inside the vulture and the vulture is now inhabiting Joni's body. This leads to her killing both of her parents. Her mother's death is explained away as an animal attack, but her father's death is blamed on her brother. He was present when it happened, and his insistence that his frail sister had done it and that she was possessed by an animal spirit landed him in an asylum, which is why he hadn't made the trip to Timber with Joni.

There is some more spiritual mumbo-jumbo that transpires about why Joni is killing people and how she chooses her victims, but in the end Cindy traps the vulture's spirit in the body of her brother's blind parrot, Bala decides to return to Africa to finish his shamanistic training with his grandfather, and Jason is still a rich asshole on the morning of the joint funerals for Ray and Joni, calling Cindy to talk as if he didn't almost send her to her death at Crystal Falls to try to look like a big strong man.

I thought that I remembered the twist from this book, but I was confusing it with another Christopher Pike book where a high school girl dies going over a waterfall, Fall Into Darkness. In the 80s, media led me to believe that quicksand would be a much bigger threat than it turned out to be, but Pike was out here doing his part to remind us that waterfalls are also dangers we should be worried about. I think if I wasn't trying to place the twist ending I was thinking of into the story, I would have clued in to the animal transference thing a lot earlier. It's such a strange, specific detail for it to have been there just for flavor.

Once Ray tells Alex that Joni called him for a date, however, I figured out that she had to be source of the problem. I figured she had somehow been part of the ritual and taken on some kind of animal power; Pike reveals that Bala's athletic prowess comes from his transference experiences, and each time he entered an animal he was able to return to his body with that animal's "special gift." But it turned out that she was a whole ass vulture, and Joni was long dead - her spirit, at least.

Although some of the content hasn't aged all that well (the young men in this book are defintiely not good role models for consent or how not to objectify women), it was still a pretty entertaining story and the supernatural elements are interesting. I read a lot of Pike growing up, and I know that as his career progressed his books got weirder and weirder; he seemed to be getting into some ancient aliens type stuff that drove a lot of his stories in ways that fused futuristic sci-fi type stuff with Indian mythology and traditions. I'm definitely going to be reading my way through his catalog as well, and I'm going to do some more research into the kind of stuff he was up to outside of his writing.

Side note: I included the second cover image because I think it's a misfire. The original cover preserves the mystery, suggesting that Karen was killed by something or someone mysterious without giving too much away. Putting a big old vulture right on the cover has the possiblity of spoiling the mystery; clever readers would pretty easily put the clues together the first time Bala talks about the animal transference ritual (even if they don't yet have enough information to know who the possessed killer is).

I'm excited to revisit more of Pike's world. I loved his books as well as Fear Street, but the two authors approach their teen characters very differently. While Stine's characters often have a naive, prudish understanding of their romantic urges (#JusticeForSuki), the teens in Pike's world are thinking about sex and having sex, and it's just a part of their lives and their desires. The teens in Stine's world are romantic and hoping for stolen kisses under the moonlight. Pike's teens? They be fucking. His understanding of teens is more nuanced and worldly, and I think that pairs well with his more openly supernatural world. I just hope that the characters of color in other books get a more complex portrayal than Bala because...yikes.