It doesn't talk down to the reader and, in fact, challenges them. The positive side of the maturity in The Midnight Club is that it does feel like a 'real' novel. Clearly Pike, if this novel is any indication of his wider bibliography, wanted to expose teens to the real world more than slasher shlock.

Stine did this by design, however, to emphasize fantastic 'fun' adventures rather than realistic terrors. He might kill off a dozen teens in a single Fear Street adventure, but none of the characters would have cancer. To cope, they meet at midnight and share short stories about characters with veiled symbolic connections to their own anxieties around death and the afterlife.ĭeep stuff, right? Stuff you wouldn't expect to find in teen fiction from 1994. They live in a hospice together, physically and emotionally exhausted, expecting to die every day.

The entire cast of characters are terminally ill teenagers faced with such real-life horrors as cancer and AIDS. The Midnight Club (1994) is an excellent example of just how different they can be. They both dominated the YA horror market during the '90s but are otherwise very different authors. It's weird that Christopher Pike always gets compared to R.L. Then one of them does die, and the story begins.

The first one who dies is to make every effort to contact the others from beyond the grave… Any type of story they could think of, they would tell-ones filled with intrigue and horror, of life and death… True stories, made-up stories, and stories that fell somewhere in between.īut one night, in the middle of a particularly scary story, the five kids make a pact with each other. They called themselves the Midnight Club, and everytime they came together, they would take turns telling each other stories. It was a place of pain and sorrow, but also, remarkably, a place of humor and adventure.Įvery night at twelve, a group of five young girls and boys at the hospice came together. Rotterham Home was a hospice for young people-a place where teenages with terminal illnesses went to die. From the author of The Wicked Heart and The Immortal comes a be autiful and haunting novel about a group of five terminally ill teenagers whose midnight stories become their reality.

The midnight club christopher pike plot