Books
“Eye Candy” – Revisiting R.L. Stine’s 2004 Novel and the Short-Lived MTV Series It Spawned
Although R. L. Stine is best known for scaring younger audiences, namely with series like Fear Street and Goosebumps, the prolific children’s author has dabbled in adult stories from time to time. Sprinkled throughout his extensive oeuvre are the occasional grown-up tales of terror; four to be exact. In Stine’s third novel aimed at older readers, Eye Candy shadows a woman looking for love in all the wrong places. Specifically a website that caters to lonely hearts. Unfortunately, putting herself out there also paints a target on her forehead.
From scathing celebrity gossip blogs to burgeoning social media platforms and “stan” cultures, the mid to late 2000s was a wild time to be online. Dating for some folks had already shifted to the ‘net before Eye Candy was published in 2004, but not a great deal of fiction was covering this alternative for courting. There was once a general wariness toward online dating, whereas nowadays everyone does it. Yet before swiping right was ever an option, singles uploaded their personalities and desires to sites like Match.com and OkCupid in hopes of making an eventual connection offline. The “horror” stories born from these encounters were usually of the awkward variety. Stine, however, pictured a different outcome for his character Lindy Sampson.
Beautiful, smart, and humble — 23-year-old Lindy seems to have her life together in spite of a recent tragedy. Her ex, a cop named Ben, died in a car chase only one year prior to the story. Her friends and roommates, Ann-Marie and Luisa, encourage her to post a profile on Meet-Market.com; the former pal goes ahead and makes one on Lindy’s behalf. A username of “Eye Candy” catches the attention of three eligible men: bad kisser Brad, cheapskate Jack, and cinephile Colin. While her dates seem harmless enough, Lindy is soon faced with the possibility that one of them is dangerous. She enlists the help of Ben’s former partner, Tommy Foster, who advises Lindy to continues dating her four beaus as a way to expose her stalker.
Aside from the sporadic coarse language and a very brief sex scene, Eye Candy feels like something out of Fear Street. The characters are hardly that much older than the oldest protagonists in a Shadyside thriller, but the story distinctly takes place in post-9/11 NYC as opposed to small-town America. The big city setting adds to Lindy’s paranoia and summons a bigger playground for the cat-and-mouse games. Of course most of the suspense occurs in more intimate spaces or situations; Lindy’s room is ransacked and her dates gradually become sources of dread rather than pleasure.
By the early 2000s, society had slowly begun to embrace the idea of meeting their soulmate online. This is only after reconsidering a long run of distrust of the internet passed down by over careful parents and perpetuated by the media. Stine plays into that doubt without agreeing with it. He ultimately shows Lindy’s luck with guys she knows or meets in real life is no better if not assuredly worse. On two separate occasions, an acquaintance sexually harasses Lindy right beneath his girlfriend’s nose. Meanwhile, that fourth suitor, the accidental addition to her dating pool, is glaringly suspicious from the start.
Avid Point Horror and Fear Street readers will feel at home with Eye Candy. The story is like an old favorite outfit but in a new color. The characters have more defined personalities, the humor often at Lindy’s expense comes across as natural, and the internal, Maniac-like workings of the killer are on full display. And as usual with Stine’s output, there is a twist in the tail.
Even though there were reports of fellow adult Stine novels Superstitious and The Sitter being turned into films — with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures attached to The Sitter — neither were adapted in the end. However, Eye Candy was sent to the small screen. Premiering on January 12, 2015, Lindy Sampson’s perilous dating life was retold in a 10-episode series loosely based on the book. Practically everything was changed in this short-lived MTV drama.
Rather than being an editorial assistant at a children’s books publisher, Lindy (Victoria Justice) is now an MIT dropout and an exceptional hacker who was arrested by her boyfriend, an undercover cop named Ben (Daniel Lissing). This is after she used her hacking skills to find information about her abducted younger sister, Sara (Jordyn DiNatale). After serving her time, Lindy is back to her old habits as she continues searching for Sara and evading the unwanted attention of a serial killer haunting a dating app called Flirtual. Someone Lindy met from Flirtual is a murderer, but who?
Another significant change is Tommy Foster, who is now the much younger and more suave Tommy Calligan. Casey Deidrick’s role also serves as a viable love interest for Lindy. Along for the deadly ride are three new companions not seen in the book: fellow hacker George (Harvey Guillén), best friend Sophia (Kiersey Clemons), and frenemy Connor (John Garet Stoker). They are later joined by Sophia’s troubled friend from school, Tessa (Theodora Miranne), who grapples with her own sizable secret.
A lot has changed since the Eye Candy book came out, so updating the dating scenario makes sense. Stine’s original story might have worked as a feature film, but stretching it into a serialized thriller would have been challenging. This TV version is modeled after the likes of CSI and other procedural dramas. When she is not investigating Sara’s whereabouts or fending off the Flirtual killer, Lindy solves other cases with the same cyber-crimes police unit that arrested her in the first place.
No longer blond and interminably nervous, Justice’s take on Lindy is a one-eighty. She is slightly edgier and definitely more confident than her literary counterpart. Something that carried over, though, is the humility that keeps Lindy grounded in spite of her head-turning looks. Stine wrote Lindy to be self-aware, but the TV portrayal has a tendency to overlook the obvious. On the other hand, the new Lindy comes preloaded with phenomenal computer abilities and general resourcefulness, thus making her a capable opponent for both the Flirtual killer and a potential archvillain known as Bubonic.
Regretfully, not everything is wrapped up by the last episode, which doubles as the series finale. Viewers are instead left with weighing, unanswered questions and a burning desire to see Lindy find peace and closure. The Eye Candy show is substantially different from what Stine envisioned, yes, but the changes allow for a more engaging television experience. The stakes are higher and the twists are aplenty in this tangled interpretation of the source material.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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