CBR11Bingo – And So it Begins (First Stranger Things Novel)
This is a kind of book I would not normally read. Usually I’d assume that a tie-in novel to a popular TV series would just be a cash grab and not worth my time, especially if I knew going in that would feature very few of the characters from the show and, being a prequel, had some pretty strong limitations on where the plot could go. And yet, because of my affection for Stranger Things and my knowledge that it will likely be more than a year until the next season, I talked myself into reading Suspicious Minds, which covers the life of Eleven’s mother and her involvement with Dr. Brenner’s experiments. I convinced myself that since Stranger Things is such a big hit and probably makes a ton of money for Netflix, they could afford to hire a really good author to write the story, and that the creative team wouldn’t just stick the show’s name on any old piece of work. I should have stuck to my instincts.
As I said, Suspicious Minds focuses on Eleven’s mother, Terry Ives. In 1969 she’s a student at Indiana University with an activist boyfriend and an older sister who’s been more like a parent since their mother and father died in a car crash. Terry wants to lead a life that makes a difference, so when her roommate quits a study supposedly connected to national defense that’s being conducted at nearby Hawkins Laboratory, Terry connives to take her place.
Once she’s a part of the study she makes fast friends with the other three participants, all around her age. Fellow students Ken, who claims to be a psychic, and science major and comic book nerd Gloria, as well as Alice, who is a budding mechanic at her family’s garage. Each of the four quickly comes to the realization that they are being treated worse than they’ve signed up for. They’re being dosed with LSD and subjected to interrogations. The four decide to band together and figure out what the untrustworthy Dr. Brenner is up to, a decision that becomes more urgent once they realize that some of Brenner’s other subjects are young children.
While you certainly could write an interesting, entertaining novel based on the premise outlined above, that is unfortunately not what has happened here. The biggest problem is the prose itself. Some writers us beautiful prose to elevate a story, while others use workmanlike prose to let the story stand on its own. The prose here however, is so anodyne and lifeless as to be distracting. Most of the book reads at a very low grade-level, and while I don’t need ten-dollar words to make a novel exciting, always using the simplest possible word isn’t very interesting either. Even worse for the novel is that all of the characters talk with exactly the same voice, despite their widely different backgrounds and interests. Reading the dialogue by itself you would never have any idea which character was speaking. It’s repetitive and dull.
The plot is also slight, with more scenes of the characters talking about what they’re going to do than there are scenes of them actually doing something. This is mainly due to the fact that the plot is necessarily restricted by the TV show. Though there is some mystery in the particulars, the basic parameters of the ending are no surprise.
With it’s lifeless prose, flat characters, and meager plot, Suspicious Minds adds nothing of value to the Stranger Things universe, and anyone hoping to get a Hawkins fix before the next season starts should probably just re-watch the first three seasons instead.