The horror genre abounds with stories of ghosts and the restless dead. Most of these stories are told from the perspective of the living: those left behind to grieve their losses, solve their mysteries, or contend with the inexplicable goings on in the haunted house they just moved into. Far fewer of these stories are told from the perspective of the dead themselves, though this is the basic premise of Christopher Pike’s Remember Me trilogy, which includes Remember Me (1989), The Return (1994), and The Last Story (1995).
The Remember Me trilogy is told from the perspective of first-person narrator Shari Cooper, who opens Remember Me with the reflection that “Most people would probably call me a ghost. I am, after all, dead. But I don’t think of myself that way. It wasn’t so long ago that I was alive, you see … I had my whole life in front of me. Now I suppose you could say I have all of eternity before me. I’m not sure exactly what that means yet” (5). Throughout Remember Me, Shari’s narrative trajectory follows that of many other teen horror heroines, with the notable exception that she’s dead and is telling her tale from the other side. As the book opens, she’s preoccupied with parties, friends, and boyfriend drama, though her priorities soon shift when she’s murdered, returning to find out who pushed her off the balcony at her friend’s birthday party and to make sure those who love her know that she didn’t commit suicide.
Immediately after her death, Shari regains disembodied consciousness to find herself back home, watching in confusion and horror as her family receives the news of her death. She sees her dead body in the morgue and attends her own funeral. She struggles to figure out what the capabilities and limitations of her new state of existence are, navigating the complexities of what she thinks should be possible versus what she can actually do: for example, early on she discovers that she can’t pass through closed doors or windows, so she sticks close behind those she’s following and sneaks through when they open them, though after she learns the ropes of her afterlife agency, she discovers that with some suspension of disbelief and focus, she can levitate, fly, and transport herself from one place to another by thought alone. Figuring out the rules of this new state of being gets easier when she finds Peter, a boy she knew from school—and had a crush on—who died a couple of years ago. Peter is able to teach her a lot of tips and tricks for getting around, as well as warn her about the dangers of the Shadow, a threatening figure that stalks them.
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A House With Good Bones
The mysteries of Shari’s death—and afterlife—are largely solved by the end of Remember Me: Shari was pushed to her death by a girl named Amanda, a casual acquaintance of Shari’s who is (sort of) dating Shari’s brother Jimmy. Amanda’s mother Mary cleans for the Cooper family, and Shari and Mary have a close, maternal relationship, which takes on a new level of complexity when Shari discovers that Mary is her birth mother. Through a good deal of invisible sleuthing and spying, Shari discovers that she and Amanda had been maliciously switched at birth by Mary’s sister, a nurse who had discovered that Mary was sleeping with her husband, who was the father of Mary’s child. This means Amanda and Jimmy are biologically brother and sister, though Amanda seems weirdly into it when she finds out and actually redoubles her efforts to seduce Jimmy—and then murder him. The desperate need to save Jimmy helps Shari break through the block she has about using her full ghostly powers and she is able to fly to his side and intervene, ultimately saving his life.
Shari’s narrative perspective is unique, as she tells her story from her afterlife perspective by taking control of her brother’s body while he’s sleeping. Throughout Remember Me, Shari has been able to slip into people’s minds when they’re sleeping, where she can see and influence their dreams—including a particularly memorable one her ex-boyfriend Daniel is having where he’s about to have sex with a girl who is a synthesis of Shari, Shari’s friend Beth, and Daniel’s cousin Marsha, while Daniel is dressed in a full scuba diving wetsuit and flippers. Shari uses this power to ask her friends questions, examine their thoughts and feelings about her in order to ascertain which of them might have murdered her, and offer reassurance and closure as they grieve. Once the mystery of her murder has been solved, Shari takes control of Jimmy’s body while he’s sleeping and writes the story of her afterlife thus far, as a message to him (and later, in her next life as a novelist, as a published book).
While Peter is terrified of the Shadow, Shari is able to face hers head on. As Peter explains, “There is a different Shadow for each of us. While we live in the world, it is with us all the time. It colors our thoughts, how we feel, how we see others, and even how others see us. It is a part of us. It is with us from birth. We simply add to it as we grow. It is the product of our experience on earth. It is the sum of our thoughts and feelings” (233). Facing one’s Shadow in the afterlife requires that the individual “come face to face with yourself … see yourself as you really are” (233). Shari’s encounter with her Shadow takes her back to her infant self and this is how she discovers the switched-at-birth mystery of her identity and Amanda’s motive. While this is revelatory for Shari, Peter’s horror is reframed when he confesses to Shari that his death was not the accident everyone believes it was: he committed suicide by driving his motorcycle head-on into a truck, and the guilt and shame he feels about it make it impossible for him to face his Shadow or move on from this earth-bound existence.
In Remember Me—as in many of Pike’s other books—suicide is discussed with more sensitivity and complexity than in other books in the ‘90s teen horror tradition. Shari doesn’t want her family and friends to think she committed suicide and wonders if that perception is why so few of her peers are at her funeral, while for Peter, throughout the Remember Me trilogy, suicide is presented as a mistake he regrets and must atone for in his afterlife and reincarnation process, beginning with coming to terms with his own Shadow.
At the end of Remember Me, both Shari and Peter are able to pass on to the next plane of existence, transcending the earthly realm. The Return and The Last Story navigate the interconnections between their spiritual existence beyond and their return to earth, as they work to make a difference, both for themselves and for humanity. These latter two books resonate and overlap with Pike’s The Last Vampire series, as Shari and Peter meet and learn from a spiritual teacher called the Master, who tells them about the interconnection of all life across the multiple planes of existence.
In The Return and The Last Story, Shari and Peter become what the Master calls “Wanderers,” spirits who can enter into the bodies of the living in a symbiotic relationship that benefits both individuals: the living person often experiences this connection as a spiritual awakening, while the Wanderer has the chance to return to a corporeal existence and make a difference for the greater good of humanity. As a Wanderer, Shari occupies the body of Jean Rodrigues, while Peter enters the body of Jean’s boyfriend, Lenny Mandez. Jean and Lenny live in an impoverished neighborhood of Los Angeles and are all too familiar with drugs and gang violence. Lenny is a drug dealer and Jean is about to graduate high school with no clear future or path forward in mind. Jean just found out she’s pregnant with Lenny’s child and (though Jean doesn’t know this) Lenny suspects Jean of being unfaithful and is planning to kill her. Lenny attempts to kill Jean by rigging a rickety balcony to collapse beneath her—echoing Shari’s own death falling from a balcony a year earlier—though he finds himself crushed beneath it when all doesn’t go according to plan, and they both end up in the hospital, which is where Shari and Peter move in, with Jean in a coma and Lenny paralyzed from the waist down.
Throughout The Return, Shari is aware of her double-consciousness, becoming a synthesis of Shari and Jean, but Peter’s identity is entirely eclipsed by Lenny’s, part of the process of learning and growth that the Master foretold. Shari is sent back with a purpose: to write stories of the spiritual realm beyond, become famous, and by doing so, bring awareness and positive change for the disenfranchised people in Jean’s neighborhood. There seems to be little challenge in Shari’s transition from the upper-class experience of her own life (her parents bought her a brand new Ferrari for her last birthday) to Jean’s life of poverty, drugs, and violence. Aside from a brief “just say no”-style conversation between Jean and her friend Carol about how drugs aren’t the answer to anyone’s problems and the occasional comment about how others perceive Jean as a result of the neighborhood where she lives, these issues of systemic inequality remain largely unaddressed. Once Shari takes over, Jean doesn’t spend much time in her neighborhood anymore and by The Last Story, she has become successful enough to get an apartment in Venice Beach and leave the old neighborhood behind for good (she still maintains relationships with her family and with Carol, though the reader never actually sees these).
Once the upper-class white people take control of Jean and Lenny’s bodies and lives, things get a lot better, which is obviously problematic. Is the suggestion here that Jean and Lenny were stuck in their neighborhood because they didn’t work hard enough to get out? Didn’t want it enough? Were bad people who have now been taken over by good—or at least better—people, who can make the positive changes that Jean and Lenny were unable to make for themselves? All in all, Pike’s goal seems to be to introduce his largely white, middle-class teen readers to places and people they were unlikely to know in their everyday lives, to encourage understanding and empathy, though the fact that these characters and their experiences largely disappear, overshadowed by Shari and Peter’s own, leaves this possibility for connection falling flat.
The representation of Lenny’s paralysis is also often problematic. When Peter is sent back to earth to inhabit Lenny’s body, the Master tells Peter that being placed in Lenny’s “imperfect” body is a kind of karmic punishment for Peter’s suicide. Peter accepts this as an “appropriate” punishment, though since he forgets who is is and has his personality completely overridden by Lenny’s when he enters the other man’s body, this instead becomes a kind of internalized self-loathing, which is really unfair to Lenny—not to mention any readers with a disability who might be horrified by this representation. Lenny struggles to come to terms with how his paralysis will change his life moving forward and there’s a lot of focus on what this means for his sex life and by extension, Lenny/Peter’s relationship with Jean/Shari. Lenny/Peter gains independence and self-efficacy through The Return and The Last Story, with this representation slowly but surely moving in a more empowering direction. He masters the details of his new life on his own terms, able to take care of himself, drive, and form meaningful and positive relationships, including mentoring kids with disabilities. He has a rich, full life, though he often finds himself contending with and correcting others’ perceptions of his abilities and quality of life. Pike’s increasingly nuanced representation of Peter is looking promising … right up until Peter is magically cured of his paralysis through the power of divine love in the final scenes of The Last Story. Apparently, all that was needed to repair his severed spinal cord was enlightenment and spiritual transcendence.
Stories and storytelling are central to Pike’s Remember Me trilogy, much as they are in other Pike books like Master of Murder (1992), Road to Nowhere (1993), and The Midnight Club (1994). These stories serve multiple purposes, including allowing Shari to tell her own story, to give readers a glimpse of the work that is making Shari/Jean so successful in The Return and The Last Story, and to impart the wisdom of the spiritual realm to Shari/Jean’s readers. There are also some fun story-within-story connections to Pike’s larger universe, as early in Remember Me, Shari’s friend Jo tries to give her an unfinished story that Peter wrote before his death about a VCR that can record the future, a plot that mirrors Pike’s own The Eternal Enemy (1993).
The central story of Remember Me comes up multiple times over the course of the trilogy, a text within the text: first, as something Shari wrote using Jimmy’s body to tell her story, which also serves as proof to Jimmy that Shari is who she says she is when she returns in Jean’s body. Once she has gained success as an author, Remember Me is also one of the books she writes and sells as Jean Rodriques. She publishes her books under the “pseudonym” Shari Cooper, which causes some problems, since she’s telling the story of the “real” Shari Cooper’s murder, with the dead girl’s name on the cover, which is almost guaranteed to attract the attention of those who knew and loved Shari. Both Shari’s mother and the detective that investigated Shari’s murder see her name, recognize the story, and have questions that aren’t really easy to answer. While the detective seems willing to believe that impossible things can happen and this just may be Shari—as long as he doesn’t have to think about it too much or for too long—Shari’s mother is understandably re-traumatized, torn between yearning for a connection with the daughter she lost and being devastated that someone is seemingly exploiting and profiting from her daughter’s murder. Shari approaches her mother as Jean, saying that she was a friend of Shari’s and that she wrote the book to let people know that Shari “goes on, we all go on. That’s the point of the story. And wherever she is I know she would want me to tell you how much she loved you” (783). Through this subterfuge, Shari is able to have the tender last moments with her mother that she had missed out on and as her health in Jean’s body begins failing, Shari’s mother actually tucks her into her childhood bed, where Shari closes her eyes and peacefully slips into the afterlife again (which feels like it’s going to be a whole new kind of trauma for Shari’s poor mother, when she comes back and discovers this mysterious stranger dead in her dead daughter’s bed, but that’s not Shari/Jean’s problem).
The Return and The Last Story also include some of the stories Shari/Jean writes, which adds some depth and dimension to the work she’s doing and life she’s living beyond the scope of Shari’s murder. The Return includes an embedded short story that reflects on the age-old author question of “where do your ideas come from?” as author Debra Zimmerer faces off with Sam O’Connor, a lecherous troll who lives in her closet and is the source of her creative power. In The Last Story, Shari/Jean is serving as executive producer on the film adaptation of one of her most successful books, First to Die, with the story of tormented teens adrift in shark-infested waters a recurring narrative within the book. More impactful, however, is Shari/Jean’s work on a long story called “The Starlight Crystal,” which taps into the esoteric conflicts and interdimensional time travel that took place 300,000 years in humanity’s past, a reality she discovers as she writes, drawn back to the divine motivation for her return to earth and her occupation of Jean’s body.
These stories within the larger stories give voice to individual characters’ experiences and ensure that they are remembered, as well as providing a narrative negotiation of how we experience and recall the details of our own lives (whether the miraculous or the mundane), the stories we tell about ourselves and others, and what stories we want told about us after our lives. These stories are a vehicle for imparting divine wisdom, even if the person reading these texts remains unaware of these larger purposes (which is often the case).
Pike’s Remember Me trilogy starts out as a pretty straightforward “who done it?” mystery with the added appeal of the murder being solved by the ghost herself. While The Return and The Last Story go further afield from these genre expectations, they also take the reader deeper into some of the larger themes of Pike’s work as a whole, including his meditations on life after death, spiritual planes of existence, and the intersections of the spiritual and the extraterrestrial, highlighting the ways in which our understanding of humanity and the larger universe are often flawed and compartmentalized in ways that prevent us from seeing the massive, interconnected scope of all life. The possibility that there is more to existence than meets the eye—whether that means the continuation of the spirit after death, spiritual transcendence, or alien civilizations beyond the stars—is one well worth remembering.
Alissa Burger is an associate professor at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. She writes about horror, queer representation in literature and popular culture, graphic novels, and Stephen King. She loves yoga, cats, and cheese.
