Stranger Things, Season 1 (Netflix, 2016)

Yes, I realize that I'm a little behind-the-times reviewing this one (okay, a lot behind-the-times). In fact, that kind of shock at my total lack of pop-culture knowledge is kind of the reason I watched Stranger Things in the first place. When my brother-in-law realized that my wife (his sister) and I had never seen the show, he immediately went out and bought it for us on DVD as his Christmas present to us. We decided to start watching it on New Year's Eve, but we planned to space out our viewings, only watching one or two episodes a day. You know, in order to really soak it up instead of just bingeing and being done with the whole thing in a day or two.

Turns out, even the idea of stretching it out to two days was some serious pie-in-the-sky thinking. We could barely wait long enough to go to the bathroom between episodes, and waiting to switch in the next disc felt like long-term deprivation. The series grabs you by the balls right from scene one and never lets go, not for a single moment. The whole first season feels like one long balls-to-the-wall thrill-ride (in a good way) interspersed with moments of heart-pounding, tingly-palmed dread (again, in a good way), with an occasional dose of comedy to lighten the sometimes-oppressive mood. 

I won't bother giving you a blow-by-blow of the first episode -- that's easy enough for find online, though I would caution against digging too deeply for fear of spoilers. Instead, I'd rather talk about the show's overall structure, and the various media from which it draws inspiration.

Not pictured: parental supervision.

Stranger Things begins on the night of November 6, 1983, with the mysterious disappearance of one twelve-year-old boy, and chronicles the fallout from this and other paranormal goings-on in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. The cast is divided into three largely-distinct groups (tweens, teens, and adults) who discover/encounter disparate facets of the strange events occurring in their town, but -- like the blind men and the elephant -- none ever have the whole picture (at least, not at first). The result of this splitting-up is to create a narrative which sometimes feels like three separate shows which share a setting and thematic elements, which cross into each others' realms with increasing frequency as the various investigators begin to share information and fit their pieces together. Imagine that Buffy and Angel had been spliced together into a single show and you wouldn't be far from the mark.

Tonally, Stranger Things feels like a mashup of Freaks and Geeks and The Goonies (if they'd both been written by Stephen King, that is), plus a little bit of E.T., John Carpenter's The Thing, pacing and visual elements from Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, and maybe just a dash of... I don't know, Akira? Maybe some Parasyte? A bit of Alien and Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Maybe I'm getting too deep in the weeds here, trying to pin down everything the Duffer Brothers referenced. There are no new stories, after all, and it's completely natural for elements of an author's best beloved stories to show up in an author's work. Besides, nostalgic shout-outs must always take a backseat to story and character development.

You might not be afraid of Christmas lights yet, but you will be.
You will be.

First and foremost, Stranger Things is a scary story, of the type that humans have told around campfires since time immemorial in order to scare the bejeezus out of each other. Throughout the constant twisting and turning of the plot, the falsehoods exposed, the hidden pasts uncovered and dark truths revealed, Stranger Things keeps returning to the time-tested standbys of classic horror: the atmosphere of foreboding, the darkly-hinted clues of a sinister presence, nigh-unbearable escalation of tension, the masterfully-executed jumpscare, and of course, the horrifying reveal. I can't tell you much about what's actually horrifying here, because not knowing is what makes it so damn scary. Much of the supernatural elements of Stranger Things are never explained in full, and the viewer is left to extrapolate and wonder, to think about and to worry, as you turn out the lights and pull the covers up to your chin:

What the hell was it that I just saw? 

Is it really gone, or was it just pretending?

And could it come back?

Pleasant dreams, readers. I'll let you know how Season 2 turns out.

Book Review: "The Illustrated Man," by Ray Bradbury (1951)

Overall, I have to say I'm a little disappointed in this book. Those of you who know me personally are probably aware that The Halloween Tree and Something Wicked This Way Comes rank among my all-time favorite books, so I felt very let down that the quality of this anthology was so spotty. I don't know what I was expecting, but the stories just don't seem to live up to the creepy grandeur of the aforementioned titles.

This is not to say that none of them do, or that the book isn't worth reading. The titular Illustrated Man is one of the most promising framing devices I've ever encountered; I sincerely wish I'd thought of him first. But the actual stories that play out upon his skin are... difficult to relate to. Part of it is the technological gap: Bradbury had no conception of the Internet, and his computers still use gears and punch-cards, even in the year 2155. Also, he has nothing but disdain for the common man and his interests, especially television, which seems more than a little hypocritical.

Another difficulty facing the modern reader approaching these stories is an affliction of fame: namely, that many of Bradbury's plot devices seem cliche to us, simply because his inventions became so popular after he invented them that to us, sixty years later, they appear so obvious and badly thought out that our initial reaction is to call him a thief, not realizing that he invented the damn thing. Though this does not really make it any easier on the modern readers to accept his plot twists as credible.

Bradbury's (or rather, 1950s America's) racism and sexism also forms a significant hurdle. In "The Other Foot," Bradbury imagines a post-nuclear earth reaching out to black colonists on Mars (who left 20 years previous to the story, to escape the Jim Crow laws). The black colonists are initially angry, and ready to treat the white colonists as poorly as they were treated on Earth, but thanks to the efforts of one peace-loving black woman, they learn to let go of their anger and let bygones be bygones. (Sounds like a nice story, until you realize that it's about white folk getting completely off the hook for their past atrocities, and getting to live as equals on a planet terraformed entirely by the effort of black people. Hmmmm...)

Another big offender was "Marionettes, Inc.", in which two men order some extremely expensive android copies of themselves to fool their wives so they can go to Mexico for a month. One does it because he can't stand his wife, the other because she's smothering him with love. Couldn't they just, I don't know, be adults and talk openly with their wives about their feelings?!

It's not all bad news, though, and I'd like to end on a good note:

Despite my endless whining and nitpicking, The Illustrated Man is worth a read, if you're a fan of either Ray Bradbury or classic science fiction. The first and last stories ("The Veldt" and "The Rocket Man") alone are worth the price of admission, and even the stories that I wasn't crazy about ("The Long Rain", "The Man", "To No Particular Night or Morning") gave me some very interesting food for thought. "The City" is extremely creepy, and contains some very disturbing visuals of bodily dismemberment; "The Highway" is simultaneously quite beautiful and quite sad; "Zero Hour" ends with a very creepy visual that almost makes up for the blindingly obvious plot-twist.

Like I said at the beginning, it's an OK book, a little careworn, but still serviceable for the most part. Take it with a grain of salt and you'll be fine.