Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds

Gwenda Bond

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, April 24th 2019

If the mark of a successful creative franchise is the appearance of spin-off stories, the publication of the first official Stranger Things novels confirms the Duffer Brother’s love letter to the 80s as a landmark in our contemporary cultural landscape. Suspicious Minds takes us back to the end of the 1960s, a decade before the events of the television show, introducing us to Eleven’s parents and giving a detailed account of events around her birth and abduction heretofore only hinted at.

The story centres on Eleven’s mother, Terry Ives, a college student in rural Idaho whose life is about to be torn to pieces on the twin altars of scientific ambition and national security.   Although her campus may be frustratingly disconnected from the political and cultural upheaval sweeping America’s East Coast, Terry enjoys the independence of university life, adores her boyfriend Andrew, and sees a future full of possibilities. Money is tight, however, so when her flatmate drops out of a well-paying experiment on the psychological effects of LSD, Terry takes her place, only to become involved in a secret government project, code-named MK ULTRA, investigating other, more esoteric effects of psychedelic drugs on mental abilities.

She is initially excited to be part of something important and quickly forms a friendship with three of the other volunteers, but grows increasingly uneasy with the experiment as the protocol broadens to include hypnosis, sensory deprivation and ECT, and it becomes clear that the project’s leader, Dr Brenner’s control over them extends well beyond the experiment. After being asked to spy on her friends and meeting one of the other test subjects, a five-year-old girl called Eight (who, it transpires, is not the only child that Brenner has experimented on), Terry and her friends decide to quit the project and take Eight with them. But Brenner will stop at nothing to get what he wants, and, unbeknownst to her, Terry has something that he wants very, very much.

It is a tough assignment to step into another writer’s world and remain faithful to both the original idea and one’s own creative voice. Gwenda Bond, who has written several Lois Lane spin-off novels as well as two series in her own right, acquits herself in a professional manner, but Suspicious Minds feels more like a writing exercise than an act of creative imagination. Unlike the Duffer Brothers, for whom Stranger Things is a love letter to childhood, Bond is writing about an era before her time. She has certainly done her research, including an in-depth study of Stephen King’s early novels to capture the linguistic idioms of the time. Still, Vietnam War aside, most of the scene-setting involves name-checking significant political and cultural touchstones – Apollo 11, the Beatles, Woodstock, the Lord of The Rings – rather than invoking any real sense of time and place.

Subtler details (for example, Terry keeping her savings under the mattress because women couldn’t have bank accounts) will pass a mostly GenX/Y readership by. There is a similar problem with the overall atmosphere of the novel; we are given glimpses of the dark, watery Everywhere/Nowhere space and the mote-filled Beneath, but these scenes gain their power from association rather than invocation. And whilst Bond inverts the gender of her protagonists, giving us three young women (two white, one black) and a gay man in place of the trio of boys and a tomboyish girl, even this change of perspective feels studied.

Not that these criticisms are likely to worry the book’s target audience of dedicated Stranger Things fans. Indeed, most could be regarded as signs of Bond’s successful assimilation into its sepia-tinted world where government conspiracies and monsters under the bed are real and a fellowship of friends is all that stands between the world and oblivion. Whether it will appeal to a broader audience is entirely different.