story of the mystery of life after death. Pike wrote
several straightforward suspense thrillers, including
The Chain Letter(1986), but the sequel to this title,
The Ancient Evil(1992), reveals that the villain was
genuinely possessed by a demon. The Immortal
(1993) pits a teenager against a hostile goddess.
The Last Vampire(1994) is the first volume in
a series that proved very popular. A 5,000-year-old
vampire poses as a teenager in order to identify a
mysterious stalker at a high school. A pair of good
vampires investigate a series of brutal killings in
the first sequel, Black Blood(1994), but the gov-
ernment finds out about their existence and wants
to study them in Red Dice(1995). The series ended
with Phantom(1996), in which a female vampire
becomes pregnant, with unexpected results.
Pike has also written occasional novels for
adult audiences, although not as successfully. A
hitchhiker picks up a woman with supernatural
powers in Sati(1990). The Season of Passage(1992)
is actually science fiction, although it turns out
that the vampires of legend are real; they just hap-
pen to live on Mars. The Cold One(1995) is the
best of his adult horror novels, the story of a beast
whose very existence is inimical to humanity. An
experiment in mental projection attracts the atten-
tion of a supernatural creature in The Listeners
(1995).
After several years of inactivity, Pike has re-
turned to writing both for adults and for teenagers.
The Blind Mirror(2003) is a competent but some-
what routine story of demonic activity and murder.
In Alosha(2004) a teenager discovers that she is
fated to be the next queen of the fairies. Pike has
always been a considerably better writer than most
of the others working in young adult literature, al-
though he has been less successful writing adult
fiction. It is too early to determine whether he will
yet master the transition.
PinocchioCarlo Collodi(1881)
There are a handful of children’s novels that have
become so familiar over the course of time, partic-
ularly those that have resulted in one or more mo-
tion pictures, that the basic plot elements have
become part of our general culture, although often
in a form slightly different than that of the original
story. In some cases the original books are read by
only a small portion of those who have seen the
film version, as is the case with J. M. BARRIE’S
PETER PAN(1904) and Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio.
Collodi was the pseudonym of the Italian writer
Carlo Lorenzini, who wrote several other children’s
fantasies, although none of his other titles has re-
mained popular.
The central human character is Gepetto, a
kindly old man who fashions Pinocchio as a puppet
and somehow imbues his creation with animation.
Pinocchio is childish, but not the clumsy, basically
good-natured character in the Disney film. He is
troublesome, mean spirited, self-centered, and
prone to cruel jokes. It is only over the course of
time, when he begins to realize that he is less fortu-
nate than living children and wants to become
one, that he slowly learns his lesson. Pinocchio has
a variety of adventures in the book, visiting the
land of the fairies and other mystical places, escap-
ing after a chase by assassins, and even spending a
short time in prison. Ultimately, he redeems him-
self and even saves Gepetto’s life at one point, and
the transition to humanity is justified once he has
seen the error of his ways.
The Disney film version is also noteworthy for
the enhanced use of the character Jiminy Cricket,
who became nearly as popular as Pinocchio him-
self, for the nasty villain Stromboli, and for the fa-
mous scene in which the puppet boy’s nose grows
longer each time he tells an untruth about himself.
Clever as it is, some of the punch of the original
morality tale was lost during the translation.Poe, Edgar Allan(1809–1849)
The American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born to
wealth. He was educated in England but soon
broke with his family and was forced to support
himself, which he did in part through his writing.
His short but productive career as a writer of prose
and poetry had a significant effect on the evolution
of short fiction and detective and horror fiction in
particular, and on poetry and even science fiction
to a lesser extent. He was one of the first writers to
emphasize the psychological component of horror,
and many of his characters clearly suffer from para-
noia and other mental illnesses.276 Pinocchio