The cliffhangers are often not about violence, but are either a gross out or an humiliation. Pike has characters who wake up in the middle of the night to a room filled with cockroaches. Whereas Duncan's books take place in the real world, the YA thrillers seem to occur in a uniquely teen world with its own set of rules. Emotions which teens feel these emotions intensely. Pike s best book of the 1990s was undoubtedly Monster .
Monster begins with a bang, literally.
A girl crashes a high school party and shotguns down two classmates because they were monsters. It s startling. Monster is one of the better books to capture the essence of puberty and the physical horrors and changes wrought by adolescence. First, they became popular because something has to be. In the 70s, it was problem novels, the disease of the week.