Teen Philosophy Club? The Midnight Club by Christopher Pike

clsimpson430
Sep 12, 2023
2 min read

My Rating: 1.5 Stars

And the award for the most misleading synopsis of all time goes to...THE MIDNIGHT CLUB!

Going into this, I thought this would be a spooky tale about ghosts. I did not however anticipate the weird turn it took. The Midnight Club starts off as a gothic The Fault in Our Stars love story about terminally ill teens, but quickly turns into a strange Eastern philosophy class.

The extra half star I'm giving this is just a testament to the fact that Christopher Pike's writing isn't awful. The characters were decent, the setting was gothic and fun, and the premise should have been really interesting. But with each story that the Midnight Club tells, the plot becomes less spooky and more spiritual.

It's hard to make an audience care about fictional stories within an already fictional book so instead, Pike has his main character tell stories about reincarnation. In almost every story, the audience can see the characters incorporated into the tales from centuries ago.

I can understand this thought process...it adds more importance to their seemingly useless stories and gives each character (literally centuries worth of) backstory instead of just adding another layer of unnecessary fiction. But it also changes the vibe of the entire book.

There could still be a twinge of hope for a fun and spooky reincarnation tale. But this one is heavy on the spiritual and existential side, and still makes no real statement about anything. And it definitely drops the ball on the "dead friends reaching out from the afterlife" storyline (which we were promised in the synopsis). Instead, it just hones in on the vague "oh the grand mysteries of life after death..." vibe.

If you're not a person with solid convictions about what religious beliefs you have, then you might like the book. But for someone with strong beliefs, this flimsy storyline was not it.

In conclusion: The Midnight Club is weird, borderline blasphemous with its Jesus-like dream character, and just a general waste of time. Congrats, I read it so you don't have to! And now we can all avoid the Netflix series together!

Synopsis:

Rotterham Home was a hospice for young people—a place where teenagers with terminal illnesses went to die. Nobody who checked in ever checked out. It was a place of pain and sorrow, but also, remarkably, a place of humor and adventure.

Every night at twelve, a group of young guys and girls at the hospice came together to tell stories. They called themselves the Midnight Club, and their stories could be true or false, inspiring or depressing, or somewhere in-between.

One night, in the middle of a particularly scary story, the teenagers make a secret pact with each other, which says, “The first one who dies will do whatever he or she can do to contact us from beyond the grave, to give us proof that there is life after death.”

Then one of them does die...