Book Review: Darkness on the Edge of Town by Adam Christopher
Genre: Sci-Fi Mystery/Horror
Age: Apparently YA
Format: Paperback
This is the second book in the Stranger Things book series, and so far I remain very unimpressed. My assumption is these books are targeted at a YA audience, but I think for both this and Suspicious Minds they don’t quite have enough of the conventions of YA to quite work as YA novels. Later books do focus on more of the teenage characters, though, and as they are written by different authors, I’ll likely still check these out.
In Darkness on the Edge of Town, Hopper is spending his first Christmas with Eleven. She starts asking questions about his time in New York, and Hopper goes into the story of a serial killer during summer, 1977. The book incorporates the general seediness of 70s New York, and the climax takes place during the infamous blackout. But before we get to that point there is waffle, and a lot of it.
Let’s start with the Christmas, 1984 scenes. I found the way Eleven was written here to be out of character and infantilising. It feels really off. I initially liked the opening to the novel, and felt like the flaws here could be overlooked for a framing device, but ‘Christmas, 1984’ wasn’t just used as a framing device. Every so often the story completely stops, takes us back to 1984, and reminds us “hey, remember this is a Stranger Things book? Look! Here’s Eleven!”. The scenes felt forced, they interrupted the overall flow of the story, and you’d get Hopper questioning “should I be telling her this” or telling Eleven “the next part is a lot” as if trying to build something up for the reader. Unfortunately, it falls completely flat. Hopper is hesitant to tell Eleven ‘the next part’, and the next part ends up being nothing really significant, dark, or gory! Not to mention she asks early on if a particular character survives, and we later get a scene where that character is in danger, but there’s no tension, because we absolutely know Hopper (of course) comes out of this alive, and so does the other character, because we were told earlier!
The book is full of moments like this. It’s also full of random mentions of Hopper’s inner ‘darkness’, which amounts to one brief scene where he gets caught up in the moment. The plot doesn’t hang together, and it feels out of place in general in the Stranger Things universe.
As for the ‘Apparently YA’ above. It’s Stranger Things, so they are going for a YA audience, but this book doesn’t fit in with YA. It’s too much a copy of 70s detective movies, for a start, and I don’t think there’s much here to grab a younger audience. There’s a lot of forced in references to remind the reader it’s the 70s – which was also a flaw in the previous book’s 60s setting – and the female characters in general feel like stock 70s detective movie characters, so that’s semi-fitting, I guess.
Things run oddly smoothly for Hopper throughout, but there really isn’t much tension to be gained by his being in dangerous situations (the perils of the prequel). I thought there would have been more here exploring Hopper as a character, especially post-Vietnam, but there wasn’t really much of that.
Overall, this one didn’t impress me all that much. It didn’t quite work as ‘Stranger Things’, though it does read like something that could have been published in the 70s/80s – whether you think that’s a good thing or not is going to be up to you, but I’m hoping the books get a little better after this.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter: @elleturpitt
Bluesky: @elleturpitt.bsky.social
I purchased this book.
