I am kicking off Spoilers Allowed, with an issue dedicated to prequels, a type of storytelling where spoilers are, by definition, included. Here I write about three Stranger Things prequels: the play in London’s West End and two authorised novels. You don’t need to have watched the series to read on, but it will probably help. Also: spoilers ahead for all things Stranger Things.

I was late to Stranger Things because the “horror” label scared me. I watched my first episode in my sister’s house one June afternoon, the shutters closed against the French sun. It was The Massacre at Hawkins Lab, the finale for Season 4, Volume 1. I got to know the orderly and the mystery of Henry Creel before I learnt that Will Byers had disappeared. “He has one of the best male arcs in TV”, my sister promised me as Steve Harrington stood panting, spitting blood over a bat he just killed. In keeping with the title of this newsletter, she proceeded to share the background of every character up to that point as we watched the episode. By the time I started Season 1, I already knew the most salient details, including Will Byers’ terrible lack of haircut evolution.

Harrington doesn’t appear in THE FIRST SHADOW, the stage prequel where we not only meet Henry Creel as a freshman in Hawkins, but also all the parents (aside from Steve’s). Ted Wheeler is a dumb jock stereotype dating his cheerleader wife-to-be (Nancy and Mike’s parents); Claudia future-Henderson (Dustin’s mum) already can’t keep a cat; the two Black kids obviously get married and have Lucas and Can’t-write-America-without-Erica Sinclair. And then there are Hopper-don’t-call-him-junior, Joyce and Bob. In a way, it’s fun to see them young. On the other hand, this borders on the same issue as The Rise of the Skywalker and limits the world. Are we meant to believe that the Hawkins kids never leave and always marry their childhood sweetheart (/situationship)? Is that the town’s true curse, that people are stuck there? Does it follow that generations of consanguinity lead to the creation of the Upside Down (not the wildest theory)?

THE FIRST SHADOW deals with some of the same themes of loneliness and belonging as the series. Aside from Creel, who feels like a freak because he hears voices and experiences murderous pulsion, Patty Newby, Bob’s sister, is the main character. In this tight-knit town, she’s an orphan teenage girl of colour adopted by a white pastor. Both sidelined by their classmates and families, Henry and Patty immediately identify as kindred spirits. Creel encourages Patty to believe in her singing voice beyond her father’s choir; Patty is convinced that he can turn his nightmares into good dreams because they’re his. As the audience, we know better and it’s a moving watch, seeing Patty try to fight for that boy even when he’s in the governmental clutches of Dr Brenner – who may or may not have started this whole experiment because he had daddy issues.  

The other theme, which the play doesn’t explore as such, but I kept thinking about, is – how do we become our parents? McCarthyism was on the out by 1959, but Chief of Police Hopper senior is shocked to see that Joyce carries a Communist manifesto. She believes in changing hearts and minds through art. She has applied for a drama scholarship at Indiana university. Contrast that with the Joyce we meet in Season 1, the anxious, loving single mother-of-two working dead-end jobs, who married and divorced Lonie – already a loser in 1959. Yet the spark which makes her determined to find Will is there as she partners with Hopper and Bob to figure out the pet deaths in Hawkins. It somewhat stretches the imagination that when bizarre things start to happen again in 1983, neither Joyce nor Hopper make the connection with their high school events, but such is the curse of the unplanned prequel.

The First Shadow answers many questions about why Hawkin came to be how it is, the genesis of Henry Creels’ powers and even how all the test kids got their kinetic abilities. Some of it doesn’t quite work with the series. For instance, if Creel got his power because his time in the Upside Down changed his blood, why are none of the characters who have gone in since aside from Will been changed? Or maybe some did, and Hopper’s time in the tunnel’s vines would explain why he was such an ass in Season 3 (it’s that or the patriarchy and toxic masculinity). How is the series going to integrate the play’s information into its fifth season, currently filming, considering its limited and expensive (tickets range from £20 to £150) run in a London theatre. Is Patty going to come back in Season 5 and save Henry with her LOVE (please, no)?

When June, the narrator in R.F. Kuang’s YELLOWFACE hits a low point in her career, her agent suggests she tries her hand at IP books. She refuses because she’s way too good for that, one of the many ways in which her character is deeply unlikeable. IP novelisation has a long history. There are dozens of Star Wars stories (Claudia Gray’s LEIA and BLOODLINE are both excellent). Warhammer, which started out as a tabletop game, has over 60 novels which always seem to be on sale in Audible’s member offers. Recently walking around my local Liddl, I found two STRANGER THINGS prequels, something I didn’t even know existed.

Don’t be fooled by the Dr Brenner-focus on the cover, SUSPICIOUS MINDS is really a novel about Terry Ives, Eleven (/Jane)’s mum and one of the most tragic characters in the series. We can talk about the marketing choices of putting a man on the cover of a novel which is essentially about the bodily autonomy and reproductive choices, or lack thereof of a young woman, but I’ll give it a generous read and say it’s because the actor is more recognisable.

Here, knowing how this will end is the reason why this book doesn’t work. Gwenda Bond tries to reclaim Ives’ narrative. She writes about a young woman plotting against a system that is going to crush her. Yet no matter the steps Ives and fellow experiment candidates take to end Hawkins Lab as they discover how messed up the programme is, they are going to fail. Ives will get pregnant, and Brenner will steal her daughter and destroy both. It feels like there is no free will in this book, and that the future is pre-determined, which is a good analogy for how impossible it can be to go against systems. Brenner figures out Ives is pregnant but doesn’t tell her because he sees the foetus as another lab subject. In the male-dominated lab, three characters are women, including one Black woman; the fourth is a gay man. Marginalised people being experimented on is true to the history of this medicine, yet here it’s a half-baked idea. In fact, my frustration stems from how much this novel tries to comment on people rising against a system built to keep them down, but with no hope they can ever succeed. It brings absolutely nothing we don’t already know.

With their Jim Hopper-focused prequel, DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN, Netflix went a different route which isn’t undermined as much by the series. Between the sticky heatwave, all-night blackout and scary Son of Sam serial killer, New York summer 1977 has inspired many pop culture outputs. Here we follow Jim Hopper, a cop working homicides in Brooklyn – he’s still married, his daughter is still alive and they have relocated to NYC after two tours of Vietnam. Adam Christopher doesn’t know what to do with Hopper the vet – there is a scene where he attends a support group and shares his experience, but we are not privy to what he says. My assumption is that 1/ Christopher cba to figure it out, and 2/ when this was written between seasons 2 and 3, the series writing team wanted to keep its options open on Hopper’s past. As a result, the novel has a lot in common with hardboiled fiction. In 1977, Hopper spent a few days embedded in the Vipers, an organisation ran by a Vietnam vet who went through a psychological experiment that sits somewhere between Marvel’s Project Rebirth and the type of program we see in Stranger Things. This left the guy scarred and determined to facilitate the arrival of Satan in NYC, which obviously requires ritualistic killings. This is not a trope I’m keen on – in the Stranger Things universe, I understand the hook, but I also think that people can be evil without anyone traumatising them.

Next month, I am planning to write about stories that shoehorn romance, with examples from TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW and UPROOTED.