#on a related note god it's apparent that I started writing this book in november of 2020 huh.

[essektheylyss]

I'm going to finish writing the most existentially stressful grocery run TODAY. It's GOING TO HAPPEN.

[ayearofpike]

The Visitor

Pocket Books, 1995 162 pages, 42 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-87270-2 LOC: PZ7.P626 Vi 1995 OCLC: 33376660 Released November 1, 1995 (per B&N)

Mary Weist has lost her boyfriend to a tragic accident, and is shutting everyone out since his death. But there’s a bigger problem, or at least more intensive inner voices telling her friends and family that there was more to it than anybody knew. Mary has her own secrets that she’s keeping from the community, sure, but she slowly comes to learn that she’s not the only one. In fact, she eventually finds out that she had secrets she didn’t even know about.

I mean ... talk about misleading back copy, right? Yeah, Tom is important to this book, but the story is about Mary, who doesn’t even get mentioned here. Tom shows up about halfway in, and his whole job was to try to make Mary realize the truth of the secret she had ... suppressed? forgotten? We can discuss it more when we get there.

Also, this book inspired its share of hate and anger when it came out. We were used to this epic about vampires, and now we have two stand-alone novels in a row clocking in at under 200 pages. Plus this one reads super fast. I think I did it in less than two hours this go-round. Maybe at the time it came out we felt cheated of explanation and exposition, but honestly? This is a tight horror/suspense story that neither gives us too much nor expects us to make up too much. Maybe the story doesn’t even need to be this long, though I didn’t feel it was excessively padded.

It opens with Mary getting ready to go to a party that she doesn’t really want to attend. It’s been a month since her boyfriend died, but she’s been talked into this party by his best friend (who by the way also wants to jump her bones). He’s got her there because her boyfriend’s younger brother also plans to go and wanted to talk to her — not about his death necessarily, but just about the guy. It turns out that the brother has felt his continuing presence, which weirds Mary out so much that she goes outside. Her ride comes and gets her after a while, saying that the host (another ex-girlfriend of the dead guy) wants to try to get in touch with him with an Ouija board. Pike Trope #1: check!

The party dies out enough that they have a smaller group to try to reach Dead Boyfriend: Mary, Brother, Other Ex, Horny Ride, and Superfluous Redheaded Twins That Supposedly Help Boost Ethereal Signal (I’d like to call this Pike Trope #2, but I think it was only in one book unless you count the short story that mentions the book). They get the board going, and it starts to talk specifically about Mary: that once, long ago in Egypt, she lived and pretended to be a god. Obviously Other Ex thinks that Mary knows more than she’s letting on about how Dead Boyfriend kicked off, and is asking specific and pointed questions to the Ouija board, the answers to which seem to throw Mary under the bus. Still, the godhood bits are maybe too subtle or unrelated if we’re assuming Other Ex just wanted to implicate Mary (and because she’s taking notes, I think we’re supposed to understand that she’s not even touching the indicator anyway). Still, she doesn’t answer questions and she leaves with Horny Ride without completing the communication.

So they go back to Mary’s house, where Horny Ride gives her a full-body massage in front of a roaring fire (Pike Trope #3), and she tells him about a story she was writing the day she met Dead Boyfriend: an Egyptian goddess is buried alive, but Mary didn’t know why or what happened, and in walking through the woods looking for inspiration she met him. So the message from the board hits close to home. After no sex, Horny Ride leaves and Mary throws on a robe and drives out to Dead Boyfriend’s grave, where she lies down and dreams about his death. (Pike Trope #4: dreaming backstory!) Evidently, they had broken into the school to precount the votes for homecoming queen, and when a frightened security guard with a shaky trigger finger found them, Mary basically told him where to stick it. So he acted all big, and she tackled him, and in the scuffle the gun went off, thereby creating Dead Boyfriend. What we didn’t know before — the real mindfuck revelation that does more to explain Mary’s mental state and personality than anything else — is that she continued to fight with the guard, specifically to press his gun against his head and force him to pull the trigger.

Obviously Mary has never told anyone this story, but it goes a long way toward both understanding her aloofness toward anything and everything now as well as giving us a little more justification and understanding for what we’ll learn as the story goes along. But for now, she gets up and goes home and goes to bed, but is awakened by a bright light in her backyard. She has to put on a new robe to check it out, as her first one is dirty, but what she finds outside is a flying saucer. Before she has time to even think about what it’s doing or what she should do about it, there’s a bright flash and she finds herself lying on Dead Boyfriend’s grave again. Obviously this is a dream, so she walks back home and goes back to bed. But when she wakes up in the morning, there are TWO dirty robes on her chair.

She goes to work and tells her boss about the flying saucer encounter, and he suggests that this is probably related to her traumatic experience (though he has the civility to accept that she does not seem to be making it up). That night she dreams of an invisible being in a desert who slowly makes herself visible to the people and shapeshifts into a body pleasing enough that they begin to worship her. There’s our Egyptian goddess! Mary’s not prepared to write this all off as either suggestibility or coincidence, so she calls up Horny Ride in the middle of the night and tells him to come right over, bringing Brother and his Ouija board so they can try to figure out what is going on and who they were talking to before.

Before they can even ask the board a question, it spells out this poem about how all love, all burn, all die. It calls this the “Prayer of the False God,” which also appears as the book’s epigraph. Pretty ballsy of Pike to quote HIMSELF in his own book. I wonder if the poem came first and he built the story around it. But the presence doesn’t hang out very long this time, and the guys leave and Mary falls back asleep. The spaceship shows up again, and she tries to call Horny Ride, but the voice on the other end of the phone isn’t him. Mary thinks it’s the Ouija board, and when she says she wants her boyfriend back it says that her desires make her nightmare continue. Whatever that means.

Back at school after the weekend, there’s a new kid. If you guessed it’s Tom, you’re right! Mary is drawn to him for some reason, and goes so far as to take him for a ride after school. They go for dinner, take a walk in the woods, and end up naked in front of Mary’s fireplace again. (Yes, Pike addresses the parents: they’ve left town for the week, even though neither one really wants to leave Mary alone.) But this time it’s the dude who stops the sexytimes, echoing her rationale for not wanting to do Horny Ride. They hang out for another day without talking, and that night the spaceship comes again. This time Mary sees an actual alien, and reaches out to touch it, which sucks her into a vision of the past.

(Aside: I’m kind of pissed off that I didn’t take this book with me to Roswell when I was there three weeks ago. Would have made a more fitting picture for the the entry, right?)

This vision describes Clareesh, a fourth-dimensional extraterrestrial being visiting ancient Egypt who wants to meet humans despite directives not to be seen. She vibrates down to a visible frequency, then reads the humans’ minds and adopts the physical form that they find most pleasing. They take her for a god and worship her as such — all except the one woman who Clareesh mirrored for a moment while getting her bearings in a human body. This woman wants to be beautiful and immortal like Clareesh, and after 30 years she starts to get peeved that Clareesh isn’t sharing her secrets. So she raises a mob against her and threatens to kill her lover if Clareesh doesn’t make with the youngifying. Obviously alien physiology is different from human, and unfortunately so long in a human body has stunted Clareesh’s supernormal powers.So there’s nothing she can do as this angry power-grabber gruesomely kills the young man and buries them both together in a stone tomb. And she can’t get out, no matter how she claws and tears her fingers against the rock.

When Mary comes to, she’s back in bed, and there’s dried blood on her sheets. Message, obviously. So the next day she doesn’t hang out with Tom, but she follows him after school as he wanders aimlessly around town. At one point a car hits a fox dead-on, and Tom picks it up and cradles it to his chest. And it wakes up and licks his face and runs away. Mary stops following at this point, and Tom doesn’t come to school the next day because what for. This pisses off Other Ex, who assumes that Mary has given him what he came for and threatens that through the power of her father the mayor, she’s convinced the police to reopen the case of Dead Boyfriend. Mary’s pretty sure that Brother blabbed some of the stuff she told him about the night he died, but apparently it was Horny Ride, grumpy about Mary’s interest in Tom and looking to get his dick wet SOMEWHERE. What a fucknuts.

She has to go to work, and tells her boss a little more about what’s been going on. She leaves out the zombie fox, but not much else. The boss, in turn, tells a story of a spirit that rose up out of the cemetery nineteen years ago, while he was lost on a walk, and read his mind looking for pregnant women in the area. The one it fixated on — one he didn’t even think of as pregnant, because she hadn’t revealed it yet — was Mary’s mom. So he figures that there must be something larger going on related to her and it’s manifesting somehow now. Mary thinks of Clareesh here, but isn’t sure why.

She goes back to the clearing where she found the alien, because she’s pretty sure Tom is going to be there. When he is, she pulls a gun and tells him to bring her boyfriend back to life. He asks if she’s sure she wouldn’t like to go back to the spaceship with him, and she’s adamant: all she wants is her boyfriend. So they dig him up, and Tom embraces him, and pretty soon they’re both moaning in pain: the boyfriend because his soul is back but his body is still dead and a month stiff and rotten, Tom because this act has drained all of his energy and he is about to die.

Whatever, right? My boyfriend’s back! Only he isn’t really happy about it. Mary takes him back to her house and soaks him in the bathtub, thinking it’ll warm and limber him up, but all it does is pull embalming fluid out. She thinks maybe he needs something to replace the fluid with, so he can properly live again. Blood! Pike Trope #4! Of course — they would have drained it all at the funeral home and now he needs some. So she calls up Other Ex and says she did tamper with the homecoming queen vote and that she’s willing to share the real ballots if they drop their investigation. They meet at the movie theater, and before Other Ex can say boo Mary fucking WHALES her in the head with a hammer and drags her home, to be blood for her love.

(I realized that I never said we’re back in a small town: Seedmont, Idaho, population unspecified because Pike has finally learned something about small towns. That’d be Trope #1.5, I guess.)

While Mary is refilling her dead boyfriend with live blood, Horny Ride and Brother drop by. They’re looking for Other Ex, who has evidently disappeared. Mary’s salty about Horny Ride being only worried about his new cock sheath, and she dismisses them out of hand. Back with (Un)Dead Boyfriend, he wants to know how she brought him back, and she tells the whole story, actually not leaving anything out for once. He explains that, yes, his soul is back, but his body is still dead, and that she has to let him go for both of their sakes. So she takes him back to the cemetery and shoots him in the head right next to his grave, which ... how do you kill a dead body with a magically infused soul? Did the bullet just make an easier hole for the soul to get out? But he’s dead again, and she suddenly realizes:

She is Clareesh, given a second chance to sacrifice herself and step away for the good of humanity rather than stroking her own vanity. And she failed.

Tom is still alive, and now she recognizes him as her second-in-command from the good old fourth dimension. She gives him her life energy and orders him to call the spaceship and leave her on Earth. Which he does, after he buries her undead body with her redead boyfriend, to struggle for another five thousand years.

The epilogue takes us back to the party, where it’s Boyfriend, surprisingly not dead, who is against the idea of using an Ouija board to get in touch with Mary, who was killed when she resisted the security guard at school. It tells them that there is nothing more to be afraid of, and then swiftly goes silent, leaving Not-Dead Boyfriend to mourn at Mary’s grave, where he thinks he hears a moan from under the earth.

The Visitor is probably too long by half, but it tumbles along smoothly. I don’t blame Pike for dragging it out; there’s no way his audience was going to be happy with an 80-page book. But it probably would have worked better in one of his short story collections coming up quick. I’m not mad at it, even as it pulls from so much of what he’s written before, because every author does that. Maybe I needed this distance from the original context, coming as it did in the middle of TWO separate book series, to appreciate this one on its own merits.