Christopher Pike The Visitor and The Starlight Crystal

In The Visitor, Mary's boyfriend, Jerry, is dead because of a stupid decision that Mary and Jerry made.  At a party, Mary and some friends hold a seance hoping to contact Jerry's spirit.  A spirit answers, and the responses sound sinister. Later, an alien spaceship hovers in the sky over Mary's house.  Mary then gets the chance to bring Jerry back to life.

If this book had been written in Pike's typical style, I might have enjoyed it.  Instead, Pike adopted R. L. Stine's style for this book and used short, choppy sentences all through the book.

The book is formatted in an odd fashion with lots of very short chapters, probably in an effort to take up space.  Additionally, the book consists of very long seance scenes with short answers that also serve to take up space.

The ending of the book is annoying and goes in a circle.  It has no conclusion.  The epilogue is an earlier part of the book repeated almost verbatim but from a different point of view.  Pike used every shortcut imaginable to fill lots of pages with content that is not interesting.

I feel like Pike wrote this book very fast in order to meet a deadline, but get this:  Pike actually likes The Visitor.  In Christopher Pike's Tales of Terror #2, Pike states, "Virtually none of my readers enjoyed The Visitor, but it is on my top-five list."  At least Pike likes it.

I would never read this book again.  I love crazy Pike plots, but I can't stand this one.

In The Starlight Crystal, Paige Christian will be traveling on a spaceship that will circle the solar system at near light speed.  Each day on the spaceship will be like 10 years on Earth.  Paige will be gone for 200 years, yet she will age only slightly.

Right before Paige is to depart, she falls in love with Tem.  Tem won't be on the spaceship, so he will be long dead by the time she returns to Earth. Even worse, something goes wrong during the journey, and Paige ends up billions of years in the future.

The Starlight Crystal is fast-paced with no lengthy descriptions.

I read this book quickly due to the high suspense. The story has lots of time travel, with Paige looping back through time.  The story doesn't really make sense.  I gave up trying to understand, but in spite of that, the book is good.