Love ‘Stranger Things’? Try out the series’ first official novel, written by Lexington author

The hit Netflix series Stranger Things is back with a new season after a three-year break brought on by the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic.

Season four, which was split into two parts with the second slated to launch July 1, is packed with paranormal mysteries and threats for the teens of Hawkins, Ind., to confront.

Gwenda Bond, the author of the first book the Stranger Things novel series, was excited to see the show’s return to form.

Her novel, Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds, evolved to tell the story of Terry Ives, the mother of Eleven, a protagonist in the Netflix series.

Suspicious Minds focuses on the backstory behind why Terry became involved in the experiment with Dr. Brenner, the show’s main antagonist.

Bond, a Lexington-based author, said she found inspiration in her research of the 1960s, in addition to the Stranger Things universe itself.

“Really it was easy to be inspired by the universe of Stranger Things (and) exciting to get to play a part in expanding it,” she said.

Bond said she felt she and brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of the hit Netflix series, “share a lot of the same story DNA,” which inspired the show’s prequel.

“We clearly grew up on a lot of the same things, reading early Stephen King novels, you know, watching John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg movies,” she said. “I really wanted to bring that feeling of a period piece into a period when I wasn’t alive.”

Project MK-Ultra and other 1960s research

While the show takes place during the 1980s in Indiana, Eleven’s mother attended college in the 60s, a time when the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra experiments, which influenced the show’s plot, were occurring in secret.

In addition to researching life in the late 60s, Bond said she researched these experiments.

Project MK-Ultra was a Central Intelligence Agency operation in which agents conducted experiments on U.S. citizens, both willing and unsuspecting, to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs like MDMA, heroin and methamphetamine for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture.

Though details weren’t released to the public until 1975, the operation spanned from 1953 until 1973 and included more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy.

The operation’s victims included mentally-impaired boys at a state school, American soldiers, “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, prisoners and even a few of the CIA’s own members.

Many details about MK-Ultra are hidden from the public today due to the destruction of all records at the program director’s command, but the case of Dr. Frank Olson has a looming impact on the project’s reputation.

Olson was an U.S. Army scientist who was unwittingly slipped LSD in a drink and jumped out of a hotel window to his death days later in 1953. Though Olson’s death was ruled as a suicide, it has been speculated he was murdered.

More about Suspicious Minds

Published in 2019, Suspicious Minds came out just before season three. That season of the Netflix show begins in 1984 and sees Soviet scientists trying to force open a gate to the Upside Down, the name Eleven and her friends give to the shadowy mirror dimension of our world.

Suspicious Minds follows Terry, Eleven’s mother, during the summer of 1969, a time defined by conflict at home and abroad due to the Vietnam War, according to the book’s description.

More from the book’s description: “The world is changing, and Terry isn’t content to watch from the sidelines. When word gets around about an important government experiment in the small town of Hawkins, she signs on as a test subject for the project, code-named MKULTRA. Unmarked vans, a remote lab deep in the woods, mind-altering substances administered by tight-lipped researchers . . . and a mystery the young and restless Terry is determined to uncover.”

Suspicious Minds serves as a prequel to the events of season one, which introduces viewers to characters Eleven, Mike Wheeler, Will Byers, Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson and others.

According to its description on Netflix’s site, the events of Stranger Things begin after a young boy vanishes, leading a small town to uncover a mystery involving secret experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one strange little girl.

Bond said she was approached about writing Terry’s backstory for the first novel. She found it interesting that Terry’s story was chosen first because viewers don’t see her a lot in the series.

“She’s obviously a fighter, and that was really the inspiration for her character as I dove deeper into her,” Bond said. “Terry was someone who would not be easily fooled, would not be involved in an experiment like this without thinking twice about it and who would fight for her daughter to the end.”

The mystery surrounding Eleven’s mother has permeated the series, but gains new importance in show’s latest season. Eleven must dive into this mystery in order to rediscover the power she needs to battle a new baddie from the Upside Down.

Bond said the Stranger Things fandom has been “so kind” in their responses to the book and fan fiction has been written based on characters she created. Some of them reimagine Eleven’s life with her parents to include a happy ending.

“It’s really been fun as a whole new wave of fans and readers across the world are discovering the book again,” Bond said.

Parallels between the 60s and today

What about the historical parallels between the 1960s and today’s time: were they created on purpose?

Bond said it’s a question she hears frequently, but she didn’t intend to create the parallels.

“They’re just there,” Bond said.

She said she thinks “there were a lot of big political divisions going on in the 60s,” which would have been “impossible” not to address in her work considering she wrote about college students.

“With the draft and things that were going on then, there was a real feeling of division in the country, and I don’t think that anyone would argue that there isn’t that now,” Bond said.

The author said she wanted wanted to explore the backlash the women’s rights movement encountered in the 60s.

“A lot of Terry’s experiences are actually inspired by things my own mom has told me about, you know, not being able to get a bank account without a man to sign off on it,” she said. “All of these issues keep coming ‘round.”

“There’s a queer character in the book who is afraid to be openly out to very many people, so I think that a lot of these issues, sadly, are still with us,” Bond continued. “And especially in terms of the divisiveness between people, and the, you know, young people who just want to live their lives and be who they are.”

Bond said she thinks Stranger Things is a special show because it’s something a lot of families watch together. She said she’s seen many families costume play, or cosplay, characters from the show together at conventions.

“I think the great thing about Stranger Things itself is that it has something for viewers (and) readers of all ages, right?” she said.

As for her expectations for the second volume of season four, Bond said she’s “always afraid to predict” and is “just as eager to see it as everyone else.”

“I’m just delighted that we are circling back to the lab and the central mystery from the jump, and that we’re delving deeper,” Bond said. “I just think Dr. Brenner is an excellent villain and a very complicated character, and so I’m glad to see him back on the show.”

Intellectual property: What’s that?

One way Suspicious Minds is different from Bond’s other books is that she’s playing around with another creator’s universe, or intellectual property.

Bond said she believes she was approached to write the Stranger Things prequel because she previously wrote a series of novels about young Lois Lane for DC Comics as an in-universe book.

“You’re working with someone else’s universe,” Bond said. “It’s always an honor to get to do that.”

The Lexington author said she thinks the misconception surrounding intellectual property-based writing is that authors move into writing these types of books without having written their own material first.

“It’s actually usually the other way around, that you write books that are well received that people like, and that’s what makes you a good fit for someone to pick to write an IP project like this,” Bond said.

In fact, she is a best-selling author of many original books, the latest of which is her first rom-com, Not Your Average Hot Guy. The sequel for that title, The Date From Hell, hit shelves this spring and is available for sale.

Bond said whenever she writes in-universe books, she wants her readers to be able to see her in the writing.

“I’ve been really lucky in that the IP projects that I’ve worked on, I have been able to bring my own voice and (point of view) to them while still staying within what’s true to that universe,” she said.

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This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 1:33 PM.