16. Weekend by Christopher Pike

Found this at the free box on St-Viateur (where my wife sometimes finds good kids clothes).  Again, I'm picking up anything that I can easily read without worrying about damaging.  This looked pretty trashy, but the 80s-ness of it appealed to my me and the first page was actually not badly written.

I was a chapter in before I realized that this was specifically written for teenagers in mind and I now know that Point was an imprint of Scholastic.  It also got bogged down in all these relatively complex relationships between a group of guys and girls going to Mexico for a weekend holiday.  At one point, I was seriously considering drawing up a relationship map on a piece of paper just to keep it all straight.  But I powered through.  Then what drove me on was to see how violent and how supernatural it might actually be.  I have to admit to that the intrigue of the story kept me turning the pages.

It turns out that there is a lot of tension and anxiety in this group of seniors soon to graduate.  Besides break-ups, rivalries and betrayals, one of them was actually poisoned at the party, her kidneys destroyed and now surviving on a dialysis machine.  It is she and her sister who have invited everybody down.  But weirdly, only the kids involved in the night of the poisoning plus one mysterious new boy are the ones who actually make it.  Also, they encounter a strange shaman-like man on the route who talks to ravens and seems to see through their soul.

It's a bit of a mess and preposterous, but quite a lot of fun for most of the book.  I can see how it would have been popular back in the 80s among the appropriate demographic (I'm guessing grade 9 girls or so).  The ridiculously happy ending brings it all back down from the dark promise of the middle, but that is probably okay given its target audience.  I have a vague feeling in the back of my mind that I have read something by Christopher Pike back in the day, but I might be mixing him up with the first captain of the Enterprise.