9 Books to Extend Your Stranger Things 2 Binge

Joe the Barbarian, by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy
You can take the boy out of the Upside-Down…
As season 2 opens, Will is trapped in that creepy nether-dimension, at least figuratively…but also probably literally, as it soon becomes clear that he’s maintained a connection to the other side, and it is only growing stronger as the anniversary of his run-in with the demogorgon approaches. The graphic novel Joe the Barbarian, from writer Grant Morrison and artist Sean Murphy, tells the story of Joe, a teenager with type 1 diabetes being raised by a single mom. His hypoglycemic episodes are lately precipitating visits to an elaborate fantasy world starring his toys and other familiar objects. The world might be real, it might be imaginary, but in either case the stakes quickly become life or death. Like Will, Joe is torn between two worlds.

Episode 2: Trick or Treat, Freak

Blight, by Alexandra Duncan
In episode 2, we get more entirely unsurprising hints that things aren’t quite right in Hawkins. It begins with the annual pumpkin crop having not just failed, but instantly rotted. Alexandra Duncan’s Blight is a dystopian YA science fiction novel about Tempest Torres, who was orphaned and left at the gates of a giant industrial farm of the future. A group of rebels blows up a research compound, releasing a blight that dooms every plant that it comes into contact with. Tempest has the resistant seeds that might be a solution, but she learns that the company isn’t exactly blameless. Resourceful teens fighting to save the world with opposition from misguided adults…sound familiar?

Episode 3: The Pollywog

Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science, by John Fleischman
Mr. Clarke offers up the wonderfully gruesome and improbable true-life story of Phineas Gage. The railroad foreman survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven through his head, but the incident damaged his left frontal lobe to the extent that his personality was altered dramatically. (Not entirely unlike what’s going to happen to Will in a couple of episodes.) If you were intrigued by the topic, Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science is a great all-ages book on the astonishing case.

Episode 4: Will the Wise

Pandemonium, by Daryl Gregory
In this episode, we see Will begin to be overcome by the intelligence from the Upside-Down after taking some particularly bad advice from the usually reliable Sean Astin. Even if he’s not possessed by the devil, exactly (OR IS HE?), Will’s symptoms as the series continues are  straight out of the demonic-possession playbook. Wildly gesticulating, marks on the body, screaming rude things and not feeling bad about it, etc. You could go right back to William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, or beyond, but Daryl Gregory’s Pandemonium is a very good recent(-ish) example. Gergory’s demons spring from the collective unconscious, meaning that people wind up being possessed by pop culture references. Kind of like what happens when you binge Stranger Things.

Episode 5: Dig Dug

The Ruins, by Scott Smith
The tunnels running beneath Hawkins are home to particularly unpleasant inter-dimensional vines. Though generally harmless plant life in our world, it’s the kind of thing you never, ever want to run into in a horror story (think Evil Dead, or, more recently, Christopher Rice’s straightforwardly titled The Vines). Case in point: Scott Smith’s The Ruins, not for the faint of heart, follows a group of American tourists to Cancun into a Mexican jungle where te ancient ruins are concealing something evil. And vine-y.

Episode 6: The Spy

Area X, by Jeff VanderMeer
In episode 6, Jonathan and Nancy head out on a road trip to meet up with the wild-eyed private investigator in order to secure the some long-awaited #JusticeforBarb in defiance of the largely ambiguous, but occasionally evil, Hawkins National Laboratory. Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X, a compilation volume of his genre-defying Southern Reach trilogy, follows an organization of the same name leading expeditions into an abandoned area of the United States where things have gone from bad to weird. Over time, some of the very people that Southern Reach has working for them come to defy the organization when new truths come to light. The middle volume, Authority, delves into the inner workings of the Southern Reach in a way that feels more than a little like the scenes set in the creepy  government lab of Stranger Things.

Episode 7: The Lost Sister

Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, by Joyce Carol Oates
Episode 7 takes us to Chicago, which is, apparently, every bit the lawless hellhole we’ve been lead to believe. There, El joins up with her sister (or, “sister”), who is leading a very 80s gang of dispossessed punks, each with a grudge against authorities who wronged them. Joyce Carol Oates’ 1993 novel Foxfire is very different in tone (it’s very grounded, and very intense), but covers similar themes: a group of teenage outcasts has joined together to escape from a world of male oppression and sexual violence, ultimately seeking revenge. It’s a very different type coming-of-age story, but Oates shows the powerful bonds that form between young people who’ve survived trauma.

Episode 8: The Mind Flayer

Carrie, by Stephen King
Given that the series serves as, in part, an homage to Stephen King, several King books are great readalikes beyond the two we mentioned on our earlier list (see also: The Mist). This episode suggests one of the earliest: Carrie. When El charges in and the party is reunited for the first time this season, we get a badass display of her power. It might be the extent of what we know she can do, but it’s still one of the show’s best “don’t mess with Eleven” moments. Likewise, King’s first original young girl with superpowers, Carrie, has her own impressive moments of raw power. If only Carrie had friends like Mike, Will, Lucas, and Dustin, things might well have turned out very differently for her.

Episode 9: The Gate

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, by Kij Johnson
Finally: season 2 took the Lovecratian elements (capricious, evil gods, tentacled monsters, etc.) and amped them up even further, the creature throw-down in the final episode being a perfect example. Almost any of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror works will give you that creepy, monsters-coming-we’re-all-doomed vibe, but there are some modern riffs on his work that build on his ideas and push them into new directions. A great choice in that vein is Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe takes us on a tour of the horrors of our waking world through the eyes of a woman from a dreaming land, not unlike the show’s visions of mirror worlds in collision. The book has all of the weird monsters and horrors that you’d expect, but from an upside-down, and female, perspective.

What did you think of Stranger Things 2?