reactormag.com
Human and Existential Horrors: Christopher Pike’s The Visitor
Column
Teen Horror Time Machine
Human and Existential Horrors: Christopher Pike’s The Visitor
Look, when you and your boyfriend have to have the formaldehyde drainage conversation, it might be time to move on.
By Alissa Burger
|
Published on January 22, 2026
Comment
0
Share New
Share
Christopher Pike’s teen horror books of the ‘90s are in a class of their own: in addition to murder, mysteries, and supernatural dangers, Pike’s horrors expand beyond the everyday to encompass alien beings, reincarnation, and the ties that bind people together over thousands of years and countless lifetimes. Pike’s ‘90s teen horror books are accessible, while also being deeply philosophical and existential. The Visitor (1995) is an excellent example of this complexity, combining human horror and grief with past lives, reincarnation, and aliens to tell a story of heartbreak and hope.
The opening pages of The Visitor plunge the reader headlong into Mary Weist’s grief following the death of her boyfriend, Jerry. Mary’s emerging consciousness parallels the reader learning about her loss, as Mary wakes up from a nap only to realize that “The horror always came with waking […] The pain came before the memory, small and sharp like shards of ice implanted in her chest. Then, with the recollection of Jerry Rickman, the ice would turn to bubbling acid and her heart would break” (1). It has been one month since Jerry’s death, which was the result of a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances. Mary’s grief is further complicated by her peers’ speculation that she was there when Jerry died and is somehow responsible, though she’s remaining mum on where she was and what happened. Mary’s sleeping a lot, she’s taken up smoking, and she has to contend with the suspicions of her classmates and the aggressively insistent sexual overtures of Jerry’s best friend, Savey.
Mary’s fighting an uphill battle, even before she goes to a party that turns into a seance, with hostess Pamela Poole and Jerry’s brother Ken determined to try to make contact with Jerry. There are a lot of highly charged emotions in the seance circle, and looking around the teens gathered there, Mary nearly despairs, thinking “A suicidal girlfriend, a depressed brother, a wannabe rock star, an oversexed cheerleader, and two brain-dead sisters—these were not going to penetrate the greatest mystery of all time. Especially not after a party of booze and loud music. If she had half a brain, she would call a cab or walk home” (24). But she can’t bear to walk away, torn between “a small part of her that was praying it might work [… and] a larger part of her that was terrified that it would” (24). The teens make contact with someone—or something—but it isn’t Jerry. The being tells them that it is “drawn” to them, though it won’t say by who or for what purpose, before telling them that “There is no death” (29, emphasis original), and when they ask the being if it is afraid, it tells them that it is, not for itself but “For you” (31, emphasis original). Pamela tries to turn the conversation to Jerry, but the being’s abiding response is that all is a “mystery” and a “nightmare” (31-37), one that it claims can be traced all the way back to ancient Egypt.
The group doesn’t get any answers and Mary doesn’t know anything about Egypt, but she does know what happened to Jerry the night he died, because just as Pamela suspects, Mary was there. The ballots for the homecoming queen election were in the principal’s office and Mary talked Jerry into going with her to break into the office, count the ballots, and find out who had won: Mary or Pamela. The ballots all seemed to be piling up in Mary’s favor and the future was looking bright until an armed guard came through the door. Jerry was quick to acquiesce to the guard’s command to put their hands up, but Mary got belligerent, challenging and insulting the guard, who accidentally shot Jerry in the arm. Mary attacked the guard and another shot went wild, this one hitting Jerry in the head. Devastated and filled with rage, Mary reflects that the guard wasn’t “a murderer, of course, because it was an accident. Nor was she a murder then when she very carefully and very methodically began to bend his wrist so that the barrel of his pistol was now pointed at the side of his own head. He had his finger on the trigger. She never pulled it. In fact, she never touched it. But she kept struggling with him […] with the complete and certain knowledge that the gun was eventually going off again” (51). And that was exactly what happened, leaving Mary the only survivor and the only one who knows the truth.
Mary finds herself walking through the woods where she and Jerry first met and spending her nights in the cemetery, at Jerry’s grave. These journeys become even more complicated when, in addition to being part of a grief-stricken pilgrimage, Mary begins to see a spaceship outside her window and an alien being among the trees, encounters that end up taking her back to Jerry’s grave time and time again.
These encounters also take Mary back along her own existential timeline and all the way back to ancient Egypt, which it turns out she knows quite a bit about, though she has forgotten or repressed the life she lived there. She discovers that in a previous life she was an alien being named Clareesh, sent to explore and observe Earth with her partner, Klaxtor. Enchanted with the humans she saw, Clareesh took on a human-like form and was worshipped as a goddess. She fell in love with an artist named Jarteen and made a friend named Phairee, though in the end Phairee betrayed her, relationship dynamics that are later echoed by Mary, Jerry, and Pamela. Phairee had Jarteen murdered and Clareesh buried with his body, though as an eternal being, Clareesh could not die, condemned to an eternity buried alive with the decomposing corpse of her lover. Mary has (understandably) blocked this horror from her memory, dissociating from and repressing the woman she once was—but when she finds herself once again at the grave of the man she loved, those memories return, compounding her pain and terror.
With her recovered memory of who she is, she has the chance to leave all of her earthly pain behind as an extraterrestrial being, which is just what Klaxtor urges her to do. He has been patiently waiting for Clareesh to resurface so they can return home, and when it becomes apparent that Mary is Clareesh, he shows up disguised as a new boy in school named Tom to get her attention and take her away. He tries to convince Mary of her true identity, telling her “you don’t belong in this world” and “You cannot stay. If you do, the nightmare will continue […] Haven’t you suffered enough?” (113). But when Mary learns what Tom / Klaxtor is capable of, she has other ideas, determined to use his power to resurrect Jerry. This is unquestionably a terrible idea, but Mary won’t take no for an answer, forcing Tom / Klaxtor to dig up Jerry’s grave, disinter his corpse, and bring him back to life.
Following in the tradition of Gothic horrors like W.W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw” or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, what happens next is grotesque, though Mary’s commitment to bringing Jerry back is unwavering. When the casket is opened, it is clear that the month between his death and now has not been kind to Jerry’s corpse: there is a powerful smell of decay and his “eyes had sunk back into his head, like liquid marbles squished by the heel of a hard boot. And his blond hair was as stiff as straw. For that matter, his whole body looked stiff. His ashen face was a mask of pain” (120). Mary can barely stand to look at him, but she’s sure that once Jerry’s spirit is back in his body, they’ll be able to find a way to make it work, certain that anything is better than losing him. Tom / Klaxtor is reluctant but he brings Jerry back and “As both Jerry’s legs began to kick, and she heard him suck in a ragged breath, she didn’t know whether to cry with joy or terror” (123). She helps Jerry to his feet and leaves Tom / Klaxtor beside Jerry’s open grave to die, drained of the life force he drew upon to resurrect Jerry. Only as she is helping Jerry to her car do the details of Jerry’s state and his physical experience begin to set in: he still has the entrance wound in his forehead from the bullet that killed him, he is effectively blind as a result of his sunken eyes, and his pain is nearly unbearable.
Jerry clearly longs for death, but when he asks Mary plaintively, “Why don’t you let me be dead?” she responds “Because I love you […] You cannot be dead. I won’t allow it” (128). She runs him a warm bath to heat his cold body and when she determines that it’s the formaldehyde that’s causing the trouble, she drains that from his body and kidnaps Pamela, draining her blood to transfuse into Jerry. Though he is still in tremendous pain, Jerry is the voice of reason, explaining to Mary that his soul was at rest and beyond pain, that she needs to release him. While Mary’s grief and desperation are relatable, she becomes nearly monstrous in her refusal to let Jerry go, and while she regrets that he has to suffer in order for them to be together again, it’s a price she is willing to pay—whether he wants to or not. In the end, only the possibility of reincarnation and eventual reunion convinces her. They were brought back together after more than 5,000 years apart, first as Clareesh and Jarteen, then as Mary and Jerry, so who’s to say that they won’t find one another again? As Jerry tells her, “There is life after death. This I know for sure now. If I leave you now, it doesn’t mean I will never be with you in the future” (144). But while Jerry can go back to the peace and oblivion of death, the only way Mary can potentially be reunited with him is to take her place in the grave beside him once more, as she did in ancient Egypt: alive, aware, and waiting for their opportunity to come around again.
Mary’s sacrifice rewrites reality, and the epilogue of The Visitor features a repetition of the earlier seance scene, this time with Jerry in the land of the living, simultaneously hopeful and terrified that Mary might reach out to them from beyond the grave. Just as before, the two of them had snuck into the principal’s office to get a glimpse of the ballots and been caught, confronted by the armed guard, though this time, it was Mary who died instead of Jerry. But just as there is a new chance at life for Jerry, there is a new potential for horror as well, one which Jerry comes dangerously close to in his visits to Mary’s grave and his yearning lament that “I wish I was in that black tomb with you. I just wish we were together” (161). Broken hearted and grieving, Jerry isn’t sure what to do when he hears a moan from Mary’s grave. Dismissing it as a figment of his horrified imagination, Jerry leaves and when the moan comes again “He didn’t hear it. Not this time […] But it would be there, another night, when he returned. […] Sometimes the wrong wishes came true” (162).
In The Visitor, there’s no cheating death, but death is also not the end. The way Pike negotiates these horrors is nuanced, combining the intensity of human emotion and grief with the cosmic and existential implications of alien life and reincarnation. Pike layers horror upon horror, with human violence, reanimation of the dead, and terrors that cross millennia, synthesizing the intensely human and the timelessly eternal. [end-mark]
The post Human and Existential Horrors: Christopher Pike’s <em>The Visitor</em> appeared first on Reactor.
New Posts (Home)
ChatBox
Popular Posts 
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
