Spooky October reading continues, as we hit 1981's PIN, written by Andrew Neiderman. It bears mentioning here that Mr. Neiderman may be better known by his pen name, V. C. Andrews. (So, technically, he ghost writes all of her stuff, or did, since she died in 1988. There's no real authoritative list of when he actually took over.) And frankly, reading this, you can tell.
We open on older brother Leon and younger sister Ursula, and PIN, an anatomical teaching doll who The Doctor (their father) used to use ventriloquism to make talk to the kids, patients, etc. Well, somewhere along the line, Leon kept talking to PIN (short for Pinocchio) long after the Doctor stopped making him talk. This makes reading the story interesting, since Leon narrates all but the epilogue, and therefore PIN is treated as a living breathing character.
When Leon is 18 and Ursula is 16, The Doctor and Mother die in a car crash. There's a bit of drama about whether or not they should live with relatives, and who should handle the sizable estate (it's suggested the one uncle would likely take the money from the kids, although Leon is not exactly a reliable narrator). Leon ends up taking control of the estate, and keeps Ursula at home with him, eventually moving PIN in with them in a separate downstairs bedroom.
This is the basic set up. We get some rather....disturbing details of their adolescence, like Ursula's lesbian experience that Leon joins in with, Ursula's abortion at 14, Leon's few sexual encounters, but the plot really gets going when Ursula meets Stanley at her job at the library. Stanley is in town with his dying mother, he has a wooden leg after losing the original in Vietnam. He does his best to treat PIN like an actual human, although Leon hears him telling Ursula that she'd be better off moving out, since something's off with Leon. (DUH.)
We get more goddamn creepy not quite incest, as when Stanley's mother dies, Leon gets Ursula to sleep with PIN, and strongly implies she did this quite often after they brought him home following the parental deaths. Anyway, Stanley does propose to Ursula, leading Leon and PIN to plot how to murder Stanley to keep Ursula at home.
The book is unsettling, not particularly scary. (Kind of how I feel about The Exorcist, really.) I realize in 1981, we would have thought Leon was schizophrenic, even if we really meant he had Multiple Personality Disorder, now Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I'm under the impression that usually involves internal monologues, not a separate personality projected onto an admittedly creep inanimate object.
If you like VC Andrews and also like a bit more psycho spice, this book will be among your favorites. Past that, depending on your tastes in creepy young adults, you'll probably be entertained.
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