Christopher Pike

Kevin Christopher McFadden (born November 12, 1955), known by his pseudonym Christopher Pike, is an American author.

He is a bestselling author of children's fiction and for mystery-thrillers and supernatural horror fiction, mainly for young adults though he has also published adult fiction.

McFadden was born in New York City in 1955, but grew up in California.

He attended college briefly before quitting and working various jobs such as house painting and computer programming.

He initially tried writing science fiction and adult mystery, but later began writing teen thrillers due to an editor's suggestion.

His first novel, Slumber Party, was written initially as a supernatural thriller containing a character with pyrokinesis (psychic ability to start and control fire), which he later eliminated upon the request of his editor.

The book was then re-written as a mystery thriller about a group of teenagers who encounter bizarre and violent events during a skiing weekend.

His editor sold the book to Scholastic Press, which released it in 1985.

Pike's next novel, Weekend, was also published through Scholastic.

He would later publish one more novel through Scholastic, the 1986 Chain Letter, after which he engaged mainly with Simon and Schuster.

Pike continued to write several young adult novels, and also juvenile novels comprising the series Spooksville, as well as several adult novels such as his 1990 book, Sati.

On November 25, 1996, Pike's novel Fall Into Darkness was adapted into a television movie of the same name, produced by his company Christopher Pike Productions.

His novels The Midnight Club and The Season of Passage have both been optioned, for a television series and movie, by movie-maker Mike Flanagan for Netflix.

The Midnight Club was released on Netflix on October 7, 2022.

Two days after the series' release, on October 9, Flanagan confirmed that Netflix had in fact optioned "28 books" of Pike's, and that he had advocated The Midnight Club television series as "The Midnight Club — but the stories the kids tell [each other] will be other Christopher Pike books", with a plan for the series to last multiple seasons.

However in December 2022 it was announced the series had been cancelled after only one season.

(Christopher Pike only wrote one book of this forty-seven book series. Other writers of this series include Caroline B. Cooney and Diane Hoh.)

Spooksville was adapted into a television series in 2013 for the Hub network (now known as Discovery Family).