Review: SUSPICIOUS MINDS by Gwenda Bond

Publisher Century

Length 302 pages
Format paperback

Published 2019

Series Stranger Things #1
My Copy I bought it

My Review
I love the Stranger Things TV series and was very excited to see that the universe was being expanded to include a series of novels and comics with Suspicious Minds being the first official prequel novel published in February 2019.

The themes that make the TV series so appealing are prevalent here though with a slightly skewed focus. Rather than a bunch of kids goofing around with Dungeons and Dragons, fighting monsters real and imagined, and having to contend with the horrors of the upside-down, Suspicious Minds takes the story back to the Hawkins Institute; a mysterious laboratory in which dangerous experiments are undertaken on the consenting and non-consenting alike for the betterment of evolution (trying to invoke superhuman abilities through unrealized potential). 

There are some nice cameos from characters I won't name to avoid spoilers but will say that this novel (set in the late 1960's and early 1970's) leads in nicely to the series proper while also providing plenty of wiggle room for more stories set prior to season 1. 

My rating: 4/5 stars. I like that fact the book has a different focus to the TV series while still being able to feel like a Stranger Things story (which, obliviously it is).