An Analysis of the Book Monster by Christopher Pike

Pike, Christopher. Monster. New York, Archway Paperbacks, 1992. 229 p.

This book is both a mystery novel and a suspense novel. It is a mystery novel because Angela tries to find out the big mystery about the monsters while, at the same time, it is a suspense novel because of all the adventures that happen throughout the book. For example, there was suspense when Mary tried to kill Jim.

I have read 229 pages.

This story is about a girl named Angela. She was at a party when her best fried, Mary, came bursting in with a shotgun and shot two people instantly.

Mary then tried to kill her own boyfriend, Jim, but failed her attempt. Mary was sent to jail. She tried to explain Angela that she just had to kill them because they were "monsters". She witnessed them eating people and noticed that their strength was extraordinarily superior then normal human strength. Angela tried to find out the truth about the so called "monsters".

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She found out that Mary was not kidding, some people were really monsters. A river nearby their school, which brought water to the school, was infected. If you would drink too much of that waster or swim too far in it, you would get infected too and soon, turn into a monster. She got infected herself although she still had her human brains. She wanted to kill all the monsters. Angela organized a party only with the monsters and then blew up bottles filled with propane to kill everyone.

Luckily, she survived. But none of the monsters did.

The main character is Angela. We can see that Angela is loyal to all her friends as she risked her life to keep Mary from murdering her boyfriend, Jim, who was a monster. We can also see that Mary is courageous as she tried two times to set a propane tank to blow up and kill everyone (the monsters) at the party risking her own life.

The theme of love is sort of developed and undeveloped in this book. Mary tried to kill her very own boyfriend, Jim, whom she had loved for a long time. Jim starts not to like Mary anymore and suddenly turns towards Angela probably because he thinks that Angela knows the truth about monsters and he's afraid that Angela would start telling everybody. Another theme developed in this book is the theme of own identity. Mary and Angela both don't know for sure who the monsters really are and it's only at the end of the book that we find out who they were, what happened to them, and what they have become.

It's a bit hard to recommend this book to a specific age group of people. The story of the book is a bit childish and I think it would be good to recommend it to people that are about 13 years old but the violence and the graphical explicit murder scenes described in this story would make this book to be recommended for an older and more mature age group; about 14 years old. In average, I would say that I recommend this book to anyone that likes mysteries about unnatural human beings and to anyone that is not scared of encountering some very gory detailed passages in a book.