{"id":1111,"date":"2019-04-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-29T00:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2025-01-02T11:29:54","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T22:29:54","slug":"stranger-things-suspicious-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2019\/04\/24\/stranger-things-suspicious-minds\/","title":{"rendered":"Stranger Things:  Suspicious Minds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Gwenda Bond<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Penguin Random House<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Otago Daily Times, April 24th 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">If the mark of a successful creative franchise is the appearance of spin-off stories, the publication of the first official <em>Stranger Things<\/em> novels confirms the Duffer Brother\u2019s love letter to the 80s as a landmark in our contemporary cultural landscape. <em>Suspicious Minds<\/em> takes us back to the end of the 1960s, a decade before the events of the television show, introducing us to Eleven\u2019s parents and giving a detailed account of events around her birth and abduction heretofore only hinted at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The story centres on Eleven\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Although her campus may be frustratingly disconnected from the political and cultural upheaval sweeping America\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s leader, Dr Brenner\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">It is a tough assignment to step into another writer\u2019s world and remain faithful to both the original idea and one\u2019s 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 <em>Suspicious Minds<\/em> feels more like a writing exercise than an act of creative imagination. Unlike the Duffer Brothers, for whom <em>Stranger Things<\/em> 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 Apollo 11, the Beatles, Woodstock, the Lord of The Rings \u2013 rather than invoking any real sense of time and place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Subtler details (for example, Terry keeping her savings under the mattress because women couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Not that these criticisms are likely to worry the book\u2019s target audience of dedicated <em>Stranger Things<\/em> fans. Indeed, most could be regarded as signs of Bond\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s love letter to the 80s as a landmark in our contemporary cultural landscape. Suspicious Minds takes us [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[305,370,322,18,407],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-305","tag-fiction","tag-gwenda-bond","tag-odt","tag-speculative-sci-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1950,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions\/1950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}