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2025 Nostalgia Re-readathon | Spellbound
No one knew how the girl had died.
They found Karen Holly in the mountain stream, her skill crushed. There was only one witness to the tragedy, Karen's boyfriend, Jason Whitfield. He said a grizzly had killed her. But a lot of people didn't believe him. They thought Jason had murdered her in a fit of rage.
And now weeks have passed, and Jason has another girlfriend, Cindy Jones. And there are new kids in town. Joni Harper, the quiet English beauty that Cindy's brother, Alex, cannot get out of his mind. And Bala, the foreign exchange student from Africa, the grandson of a powerful shaman.
Together they will return to the place where Karen was killed.
Some will die.
The others will come face to face with a horror beyond imagining.
We decided to add more Pike to our re-readathon this year, and
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impy suggested this book, which I actually didn't read as a kid. I've enjoyed our sojourn through The Last Vampire series (at least mostly) and Pike can write a great read, so I was 100% on board. Unfortunately, this book shows just how early it was written in his career, and while the actual whodunit is pretty cool, the execution was pretty sloppy, IMO.As suggested by the back blurb, the main characters in this book are Cindy and Alex Jones, who are a senior and a sophomore in high school. Cindy is pretty and popular and belongs to the song team (whatever that is, though per context something akin to a cheerleader), while Alex is a very intense cross-country runner. Their parents own the local hardware store and work all hours of the day, making them conveniently absent for most of this book.
Cindy has just started dating Jason Whitfield, the handsome quarterback of the football team and the suspected killer of his previous girlfriend, Karen Holly. The two went up to Crystal Falls in nearby Castle Park, but only one returned: Jason, who ran for the police when he discovered the mutilated body of his girlfriend. Jason swears he didn't have anything to do with killing her, but there is a lot of gossip going around Timber, Wyoming, led by a muckraking reporter called Kent Cooke, who writes absurd newspaper articles that are somehow taken seriously (and serve to info-dump A LOT into this story). Cindy doesn't believe Jason killed Karen, but she's one of the only ones on his side.
Karen's cousin Pam is Cindy's best friend; Pam couldn't stand Karen. Pam's ex-boyfriend Ray is a track teammate of Alex's. Ray and Alex are in competition for the hand of the fair Joni Harper, recently arrived in Timber to live with an aunt after losing both of her parents. And Bala
Three weeks after Karen's death, Jason suggests that he, Cindy, Alex, Joni, Bala, and Pam return to the falls so he can prove his case. They all agree (mistake #1), but while they are up there, Cindy falls into the raging river and is almost thrown over the falls. Bala saves her, even though Jason wanted the honors and grumbles all the way home. Jason takes Cindy to his place and tries to paw at her even though she has a sore ankle; when Cindy rejects him, he blows up at her for being a tease. Seeing Jason's temper in this light has started planting seeds of doubt in Cindy about his ability to kill someone in a fit of rage.
Alex, meanwhile, is spending a lot of time with Joni, who very clearly is Not Like Other Girls. She always sounds sick, hikes up the falls barefoot, and is out of school for a week after the incident, even though she was little more than a bystander. Alex fancies himself in love, especially after Joni gives him some tips to improve his race times.
Bala, meanwhile, learns of Karen's death from one of Kent Cooke's ridiculous articles and presses Cindy for information about the details. Cooke himself shows up at Cindy's door the day before the first hearing for Jason, wanting information on the little incident up at the falls. This stokes Cindy's doubts, so she returns to the scene of the accident and realizes that it was no accident at all - it really looks like Jason tried to kill her! She's set to be a character witness at the preliminary hearing and basically blows EVERYBODY out of the water when she explains what happened to her. Jason admits that he set her up, but only because he wanted to make the heroic rescue that may wipe suspicion from everyone's minds about Karen's death. Cindy basically tells him to kick rocks at this point, which - good for her! She is definitely pretty damn kickass for a late 80s YA heroine.
After Ray turns up dead in a similar fashion to Karen, Bala believes he knows what's really going on and goes after it, barely surviving his own encounter with the deadly force. While he is in the hospital, he info-dumps the truth to Cindy: his grandfather the shaman had switched the spirits of Joni Harper and a vulture, but wasn't able to switch them back. The vulture (with Joni's soul) was immediately killed, but the body (with the vulture's soul) survived, until mysterious deaths very similar to Karen's started happening all around it. Joni's brother firmly believes that Joni is the one who killed all these people - including her parents - and Bala now believes it, too, when he pieces together the timeline of when Joni arrived in Timber and when the mysterious teen deaths started to occur.
So now Cindy is super worried about Alex, whom she can't get hold of, and whom Bala assures her is in certain danger because of his attachment to Joni. She decides she has to go after Joni herself to save her brother, and gathers up some very handy things (including her pet wolf-dog and a rifle) and returns to the falls, which are apparently Joni's hunting grounds. She confronts Joni after finding Alex's jacket floating in the nearby river and ultimately defeats her by forcing the vulture's soul into the body of Alex's ancient, blind parrot. Joni's body drops over, not a mark on it, and Alex reappears, having survived going over the falls, albeit with a broken leg.
There is a short epilogue where we learn that the survivors are attending the funerals of Ray and Joni, and that Bala is returning to Nigeria to repair his relationship with his grandfather. The end.
Now, as I said, the actual idea of souls getting trapped in bodies and going on rampages is pretty cool, but the more you think about it, the more things don't make sense. If killing a person to basically suck in their life force is only really effective when Joni kills someone who is attached to her, why did she originally attack Karen, of all people? Why did she go down for a week after Cindy's incident in the river? How in THE HELL did Joni and Bala end up in nowheresville Wyoming? The fact that they originally met at all was incredulous enough, but Bala tracking her down as he did is just beyond my suspension of disbelief. And then there's all the threads that are left hanging. What happened to Jason? What about Kent Cooke's ridiculous tirade against Jason's father the mayor? What about Joni's brother, stuck in the mental asylum in England? It's like now that Cindy and Alex know the truth, nothing else matters.
As Pike gains more experience in his writing, he is more careful to wrap up all of his storylines, or to just not introduce superfluous characters at all. The whole Kent Cooke thing could've been dropped entirely, IMO, and nothing of value would've been lost.
Still, Cindy is pretty kickass, which counts for a lot considering this was originally published in 1988.
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Not yet anyway. :P Wait, no...
Uh, lesse. Cindy has a line at some point when she's starting to realize Joni isn't the English rose she appears to be about how quickly Alex fell under her spell, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that Karen, who we're told on multiple occasions, was Joni's friend, also felt pretty strongly about her new friend. Teenage friendships can form really quickly and with a lot intensity, so that could've done the trick well enough until ill-fated trip to the falls? Maybe it takes something away from her to not give in and go after Alex that night and that knocks her for the weeklong loop?
Joni ends up in Nowheresville, Wyoming because her aunt lives there and with her parents both being super dead, she's still a minor and gotta live with someone. You'd think her father's family might be closer but it is the 80's and people really did seem to think you'd be better off following the mother's side, even if it meant uprooting a kid's entire life. Then again, given how they died (and that people assumed her brother did it), maybe the disruption was the point. Bala's grandfather pulled strings to send him after her. Convenient, yes, but plot's gotta plot and it's a step or three above them both somehow being exchange students that landed in the same place since Bala was originally slated to go to England before they found out Joni'd been shipped across the pond.
I think kid!me figured that Jason might be spared going down for Karen's death because Bala's injuries would be close enough that so long as Jason's got a halfway decent alibi (and I want to say he does but fuck my brain is fried now) for Bala's attack, they'll figure there really is just some cracked out bear crushing teen skulls for funsies. Not sure I ever thought or cared about whether Cooke's vendetta against the Mayor ever went anywhere, but I will say I was right there with you as an adult wondering WTF these articles were. Kid!me does not get a pass on letting the massive infodumping slide. Which is weird, because if they'd had it being not on the front page but a reporter's column on like, page 2 or 3, I'd probably buy that the small paper wasn't above rocking the boat enough to let a columnist go on (and on and on and ON) about an unsolved possible murder. But front page? Like that? Ehhhhhhhhhh.
I do feel bad for Joni's brother, though. Realistically, the mayor probably is a shitty person given our peek behind Jason's facade, but Joni's brother got screwed. But I always chalked that one up to Pike's books not always having happy endings for everyone who managed to make it out alive.
Realistically, he probably just didn't think about it though. Cindy and Alex got to live, Bala goes home to learn all he can, and the door's left ajar for more hijinks should he ever circle back. I do wonder if he ever intended to do a follow-up and if so, had meant to do something about Joni's brother.
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It wasn't torturous to read! It was very easy to read, and I'm fairly sure I finished it in one or two sittings. It just sort of...ended and I was left feeling like I was missing something. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was the sloppy execution that was disappointing. It really feels like this one was sent off half-cocked. If anything, it shows just how good Pike got at tightening up his stories and shedding the superfluous stuff, like Kent Cooke here LOL.
I'm glad we read it! I even purchased a copy and for now am keeping it.
the door's left ajar for more hijinks should he ever circle back. I do wonder if he ever intended to do a follow-up and if so, had meant to do something about Joni's brother.
It would be interesting to see what he would've done with the other half of the story, that's for sure!
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Yay, it's surviving to haunt your shelf for another day. :D Can we have a moment to look at the newer cover with disgust?
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You once told me where the line was between classic!Pike and burnout!Pike. I don't recall now exactly what it was, but apparently he went off the deep end in a big way? Like, left his readers reeling in the WTFery of it all. I'm glad I missed that, because I've always felt his work was more sophisticated than RL Stine, who certainly milked Fear Street for all it was worth, and then some.
Can we have a moment to look at the newer cover with disgust?
The new cover just doesn't make any sense, IMO. It's a sci-fi/fantasy cover and this really isn't that much of sci-fi/fantasy story. It seems like there were a bunch of books that got this treatment and I don't think any of them are his more sci-fi stories? It's really bizarre.
Speaking of new covers - I picked up the Fear Street saga trilogy from the library over the weekend and realized that the omnibus version I got may have dreaded half-assed updates, so it will be especially interesting to buddy read, if you have the originals!