The oddness of it all.

 Now that spooky season is over, I started back into series fiction, starting with Christopher Pike's The Yanti, part 3 of his Alosha series. Which unfortunately is evidently the end of it, since TOR was going to release the next book after some kind of development deal happened. Given that update was posted in 2006, I think we can assume we'll never see book 4.

So, we spend the book flipping back and forth between the Yellow (Earth) world and the Green (Elemental) world, as Ali tries to figure out what the hell is going on, and how the hell her sister became The Shaktra. 

This includes figuring out her Fairie Father somehow became a Deus ex Machina in the race that's invading the Elemental and Human worlds, her sister Doren fell to temptation and became an avatar of the race invading, and figuring out how to free people turned into zombie, for lack of a better word. Oh yeah, and Nemi, who everyone thought was autistic, gets cured, gets revealed as a goddess, and is now running around the the Macguffin, the Yanti. 

Quite a bit is going on here, as you can tell. 

So, long story short, invading race is one of two, this one attracted to worlds bent of self destruction. We find this out as Ali enters the chamber her sister was transformed in. We also find out here that Ra, her Tanzanian boyfriend, is also her fairie lover Jira, who died in the elemental realms jumping off a cliff. 

Doren, in human form as Sherri, has a bomb, and plans to use the connected caves to cause 7 concurrent volcanic eruptions to cover the invasion of Earth by her Fairie form's Elemental army. 

We wind up with Ali in the human world, running around trying to fix this. Her Dad; Sherri's ex, Hector; Cindy; and Nemi all wind up running around together in the Human world. Ali, having woken up her fairie body, now has Geea running around the elemental world, taking possession of the dragoin armies and trying to stop the invasion. 

It's exceptionally convoluted, but it somehow stays together right up until the cliffhanger ending, which will probably not be resolved any time soon. 

I guess we can hope someday the rights get fixed so we can find out what happens next.

Shaktra Shaktra you body Shaktra your body lime

So, the used copy of The Shaktra, book two in Christopher Pike's Alosha series showed up, and I finished it yesterday. 

We pick up a few weeks after the end of book 1, with Ali realizing she is the incarnation of a Elemental Fairy Queen from a different layer of reality, and her friends Steve and Cindy still processing everything that happened, plus a troll and a leprechaun living with her, it's a bit of a mess, particularly with the police investigating the vanishing of Karl (who we found out was actually one of Ali's fairy subordinates before betraying her), life is full. 

Ali decides to return to the Elemental world to try to figure out what's going on there, after first learning that Steve cracked Karl's e-mail and found out he's been talking to someone with a Shaktra (the big bad so far) e-mail domain who lives a town over. (Seems the owner of a gaming company specializing in Apocalyptic games is the own of the account.) 

So, while Ali, Farble and Paddy end up crossing back into the Elemental realms, Steve and Cindy wind up digging deeper in to the computer comapny thanks to a run in with the owner's daughter, who is autistic/marked by the Shaktra.

Ali does find out the cave she's using to cross the realms also connects to other places on Earth, as she meets the Shaman Ra from Tanzania in one of the caves. 

Steve and Ali find out "Why yes, the owner is a bad lady" after being chained up in a cave under her house. 

Now to be fair, I was prepared to get really annoyed with this book when Nemi, the daughter, showed up, since the caretaker said her autism was from a vaccine. However, by the end, we find out that was a lie, so I lost my mad a bit.

Interesting book and series, getting back into the more New Age ideas that populated Pike's other fiction.

Well she wants to be the queen as she thinks about her scene

 So, since I'm waiting for missing books to arrive, I went digging through the library again and came up with Christopher Pike's Alosha, which looks like it was marketed as one of his adult novels, even if the main characters are 13 years old or so. 

As an aside, let's talk Christopher Pike. I'm pretty sure several folks around my age have fond memories of his YA books, as do I. (His YA fiction was about 90% fun reading and 10% WTAF. And there's more than a little crossover between them. From interdimensional sapient dinosaurs trying to kill teenagers, teenage ghosts solving their own murders, or the worst YA novel I ever read of his, where the main character is being tormented by the baby she's having aborted while both of them are dying...) His Adult novels haver a less favorable ratio. A few are pretty interesting, but plots that you can slide by with in YA don't work as well in adult fiction, like having Satan and Nazis use ketamine to force people's souls out of their bodies so the bad people can move in.

Ali is a 13 year old girl, living with her truck driver father after her mother died in a car crash on Ali's 12th birthday. Much of her free time is spent in the woods on the side of the nearby Pete's Peak, where she tries to guilt the loggers into not cutting down the forest. Her best friend Cindy isn't as keen on this as Ali is, but... 

Anyway, as we open, Ali is on her way up to the forest to tie ribbons on the trees as a small form of protest. She, however, gets interrupted by unknown creatures and winds up buried alive in an avalanche. She manages to escape, and convinces Cindy and Steve (a geek acquaintance) to go back up, since Ali is convinced it was Bigfoot. This occasion leads to finding Bigfoot prints, and Ali getting thrown in the river not far from the falls. She manages to escape and meets a talking tree who tells he she has passed two of seven tests and gives her the thrust of the plot: A Yanti has opened on the top of Pete's Peak, and she has two days to reach the summit and close it to keep Elementals from another dimension from entering our world, all while passing the other 5 tests. 

Which leads to Ali roping in Karl, who is slightly older, Cindy, and Steve to climb the mountain the next day, along with a rather larcenous Leprechaun and a troll she meets on the way up. 

For the most part, it plays out like a YA urban fantasy, and it's pretty good reading. 

Unfortunately, it's also book 1 of a trilogy, and while I found book 3 in my collection, I'm missing the second book, so we'll return to this when book 2 arrives.