Monster download epub

One of my favorite books as a kid. It fills me with nostalgia when I read it. An excellent read.

Enjoyed this book. one of my favorites

I love this book. It's a quick read and a great story. One of Pike's best!

Book came fast. It was a used book but barely had any wear. I wish that the book had the original cover as the first edition, but they dont seem to make that anymore.

“She had driven herself within an inch of death, and perhaps the alien organism that flowed in her veins had even helped her so far. But the human part of her couldn’t bear it. She was only eighteen. She didn’t want to die.”

Rarely can you use the terms powerful and poignant about a thriller with science fiction and horror elements aimed at teenagers, but it’s a testament to how good Christopher Pike is that you can with Monster. Don’t let the cover fool you; this is in many ways very adult, and riveting. This is the norm for Pike when he writes stories for those in their late teenage years. This one is from 1992 and it is both involving and somewhat gruesome without becoming too graphic. The young adults in this one — and all of Pike’s books — have a worldliness to them; they have sex or want to, and relate to each other in a very real manner emotionally. It gives Monster a grit and heart one might not expect, and makes what happens quite moving, even memorable. How often can you say that about young adult fiction, in any genre?

Monster starts off with a literal bang as pretty Mary Blanc walks into a party and shoots Todd Green and head cheerleader Kathy Baker, before desperately trying to kill her boyfriend, football jock Jim Kline. The newer girl in town, her friend Angela Warner, prevents her from murdering Jim, believing she is doing the right thing. Her belief that her friend has gone insane is only reinforced when the Vietnam veteran cop from the town of Point where they live, Nguyen, allows Angela to get Mary’s story — as he secretly tapes their conversation. And what a story it is, because Mary claims that the kids she murdered were no longer human, but monsters of some kind. She also claims they are murderers; apparently the kind who eat people and dispose of their remains. And she is very insistent that Jim Kline must also be killed, before THEY spread, and it’s too late…

I want to be careful here and not ruin what follows, but it’s very involving, and executed so deftly that after a while you just can’t put it down. As Angela, for the sake of friendship, looks into Mary’s ridiculous claims, and Nguyen keeps an eye on her, something happens which makes the ending both thrilling and poignant. It all has to do with Point Lake, a meteor, and a take on an old trope so fresh you almost won’t recognize it. Pike makes you care about the people involved, especially Angela and the sweet boy named Kevin who is in love with her. But in Angela’s eyes he’s just a good friend. Star quarterback Jim Kline, however, is another matter, and he has a very plausible explanation for Mary’s behavior which, no matter how hard she fights it, thrills Angela’s heart.

An amulet given to Angela by an Indian who knows the lake’s secrets, which has ties to another in Chile, may be all that stands between her and a hunger which begins to swallow her up after she spends time with Jim. No one is safe, not even Angela’s little dog Plastic, and as Nguyen tries to find the warehouse where Mary says Jim and the others murdered people, Angela wages a war within herself. When Mary is finally released on bail, things take an even darker and more gruesome turn. Nguyen doesn’t want to believe Mary’s story, but he knows something is very, very wrong, and takes heed of Angela’s words to him:

“Quit following me. Let me do what I have to do. By the time you know enough to believe what is happening, you’ll already be dead.”

There is a tense and thrilling climax that has you hoping for a way out, followed by an epilog which is sad and resonating. This is absolutely wonderful, even though it is a bit violent and gruesome. It never gets so ugly you want to turn away, but a scene in a basement will certainly tug at the heartstrings. As good as any book in the young adult horror genre you’ll ever read, it has that magic quality of real people thrown into horrific circumstances, making for tremendously terrific entertainment. Don’t hesitate, just pick up this one as quick as you can. So awesome I’d give this ten stars if I could!!!

As the story developed and Mary was telling Angela her story on why she went in with guns blazing, I kind of got The Faculty feels from it. It reminded me of that movie a lot, especially when you find out it might be coming from the water supply (it definitely made me want to watch the movie haha). So I really enjoyed this, Monster hooked me from the very first page and held me till the end!

Mary is one tough chick, especially when she just acts and doesn't think while trying to stop her best friend in the beginning. Girls got some balls! Though she does have a weakness, her best friends ex-boyfriend. Which is how she gets into trouble, how their date was his chance to change her. Because she notices changes in herself, she realizes that Mary might not be crazy after all.

The story developed really well, I was constantly on my toes as Angela was digging deeper into the mystery! Though since there was some similarities to one of his other books called, The Grave, I just couldn't fall head over heels for it. But, I did truly enjoy it! The suspense at the end definitely had me sitting on the edge of my seat!

A friend of mine recommended this book as a guilty pleasure, literary-quickie sort of read. I knew right away that I might not take a shine to it, but I'd enjoyed R.L. Stine and his ilk as a kid, so I thought it might be good for nothing if not a little nostalgia for the Young Adult phase of my reading life. To that end: this review.

This book's target audience is obviously teenage girls. The protagonist, Angela, is new to town, not quite popular or outcast, and is just getting into the swing of high school sociology when, one night, her best friend, Mary, enters a party and starts blowing people away with a shotgun. The six seconds it takes for her to kill the first two kids pass without interruption -- a weird anomaly, but explained adequately enough by our author -- but then she goes after her boyfriend, who manages to escape. The rest of the book follows Angela as she attempts to figure out what would drive the younng, gorgeous, and intelligent Mary to commit such an act. Mary claims she did it because her classmates were no longer human: they were monsters.

Angela, not entirely convinced, starts to probe deeper. And, yes, I meant that as a partial innuendo.

Pike's story is actually much longer than the pages in this book. He sets up a lot of complicated backstory to explain the plot, enough so that it felt like I was reading the treatment of a novel. This thing could've been several hundred pages longer.

Instead, Pike focuses on three basic things:

--Angela's detective work. This is pretty rote and predictable. She interrogates Mary twice and visits a helpful geologist and Native American, both of them brimming with exposition. Unfortunately, these scenes are also exhaustingly boring because a) by this point, Pike has already given readers a pretty good idea of what's going on with lots of elaborate dream sequences and b) they are very poorly written. Pike's formula for the dialogue in these scenes seems to have been to dole out the necessary information, sprinkled with the occasional half-hearted plea for the interrogation to end.
--Angela's "urges." It's wrong (or at least, not totally accurate) to say that the book contains sex, but Angela very often mulls over her horniness, especially when she thinks of it in light of her newfound relationship with Jim, whose body is described as the perfection of mankind on more than one occasion. Even given the vague explanations given later in the book, it's hard to believe that she would fall so completely for this guy, not a day or two after his girlfriend tried to blow him away with a shotgun.
--The "evil." There's a lot of artsy nonsense about other planets, magnetism, and baths of blood. It's not exactly bad writing, but sandwiched next to Angela's weird dramatics and hollow personal life, they sound like snippets out of a completely different book.

Uneven, tedious, and unfulfilling, this is a classic example of a book that doesn't live up to its potential. Maybe the other Pike books are better, but I'm not bound to find out any time soon.