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.
Books
Urban Legends, Serial Killers, and Space Epics: 10 Horror Books We Can’t Wait to Read This June
We have entered summer reading season.
Schools are emptying, beaches are filling, and it’s a great time to pack a tote full of brand-new books and get some reading done in the shade. But even if the sun is bright, your fiction can still be dark, because June is absolutely packed with great new horror releases from rising stars and genre icons.
From a Psycho retelling to a dark twist on Peter Pan lore to a new book from a Pulitzer Prize winner, these are the horror titles we can’t wait to crack open this June.
The Children by Melissa Albert – June 2
A blend of dark fantasy, Gothic family saga, and horror novel that’s received rave reviews from Stephen King and more, The Children follows the adult children of a legendary fantasy author who died when a fire consumed their home. Now, living their own creative lives, Guinevere and Ennis must revisit the secrets from the night of the fire, the darkness surrounding Ennis’s new art installation, and the truth of their family legacy in both fact and fiction. It sounds like a wonderful twisted nest of secrets and magic, and I’m eager to dive in.
Marion by Leah Rowan – June 2
Just when you thought we’d run out of interesting ways to riff on Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Leah Rowan comes along with Marion. As the title suggests, it’s the story of the Bates Motel’s most famous victim, but this time, she doesn’t die in the shower. She takes control of the knife and the narrative in this daring retelling of a proto-slasher classic. The story we know is just the beginning, and I can’t wait to find out the end.
Headlights by CJ Leede – June 9
Through her first two novels, Maeve Fly and American Rapture, CJ Leede emerged as one of the most exciting new horror voices of the 2020s, and she’s just getting warmed up. Leede’s third novel follows an FBI agent on the brink of retirement, running from his past and from the unsolved case that haunts him most, as he’s slowly pulled back into a gruesome serial killer narrative. Victims start turning up again, wearing someone else’s skin like a cape, with no memory of how they got that way, or how they got a lone strand of unidentified hair tied around their tongue. Both a riff on The Shining and a journey into the dark Colorado night, Headlights is one of the year’s most exciting horror lit events.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo – June 9
Cynthia Pelayo‘s novels have always felt like dark fairy tales, and with her latest, she’s taking things into the realm of one of the most famous children’s stories ever. It Came From Neverland follows a version of Wendy Darling who, while working as a schoolteacher and as an aid to rehabilitate World War I soldiers, finds old fears returning when a student goes missing. It seems that an entity Wendy knows only as “Peter Pan” is back on the prowl, and unlocking her memories might be the only way to stop it. That’s right, it’s a dark Peter Pan retelling as only Pelayo can do it, and you know you want a piece of that.
The Other by Annie Neugebauer – June 9
Annie Neugebauer’s The Extra ranks as one of the most clever and frightening horror novellas in recent memory, but that was only the beginning. This June, Neugebauer returns with the next book in what’s been dubbed “The Outsiders Sequence.” This time, Neugebauer’s strange world of doppelgangers and mimics turns to a couple on a hike who run into their exact duplicates, setting off a chain of events that will test their understanding of each other in terrifying ways. Neugebauer’s one of horror’s finest rising stars right now, so if you haven’t jumped on board The Outsiders Sequence yet, pick up The Extra and get ready for The Other.
Marla by Jonathan Janz – August 18 (Editor’s update: Release has now shifted from initial June 23 publication date)
Speaking of rising stars in the horror world, we’ve got Jonathan Janz, whose work has hit another level in recent years thanks to work like Children of the Dark and Veil. Now he’s back with Marla, the story of a local woman surrounded by urban legend, and her possible connection to a string of crimes in the community of King’s Branch. Is Marla a witch, a killer, a victim, a helpless child? We’ll have to read and find out in what feels like a perfect jumping-on point for new Janz readers.
The Sixth Nik by Daniel Kraus – June 23
Daniel Kraus has long been a favorite among genre readers, but thanks to his recent Pulitzer Prize win for his brilliant novel Angel Down, he’s more visible than ever, and all that visibility comes as he’s about to unleash a space epic with all the hallmarks of epic sci-fi and horror alike. The Sixth Nik promises everything from a sentient spaceship to a rogue planet full of plague to a nine-year-old “cultist” with an enhanced brain. This is Kraus playing in a brand-new sandbox, and genre readers everywhere won’t want to miss that.
Slasher Summer by E.L. Chen – June 23
E.L. Chen‘s latest novel is described as a love letter to ’80s slasher films, and anyone who’s taken a dive into the meta-horror of Scream or My Heart is a Chainsaw will want to sit up and take notice. The book follows a group of friends who grew up in a town famous as the location of a slasher movie, where they frequently played the characters during midnight shows. As adults, they return to their hometown, and to the location of the slasher movie, only to find that someone’s out to get them, someone wearing a very familiar mask. This sounds like a blast, and the latest in an ever-growing strand of slasher novels reinventing the genre on the page.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay – June 30
Modern horror master Paul Tremblay‘s latest novel sounds like his most ambitious yet, and that’s really saying something. Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep follows Julia, a former pro gamer who gets an offer she can’t refuse: For a hefty payday, she must pilot a man named “Bernie” across the country for her mother’s tech company. The catch? Bernie’s in a vegetative state, and his mobility comes from the AI chip in his head. As Julia moves Bernie’s body, Bernie’s mind moves through an unfathomable nightmare world, but where are they heading, and what’s Bernie really meant to find? Every new Paul Tremblay book is an event, and this one feels particularly special.
Red X by David Demchuk – June 30
This one’s technically a reprint, but David Demchuk’s Red X is so revered among the horror community, and particularly other horror authors, that it feels worth highlighting, especially during Pride Month. Complex and metatextual, Red X is about a series of disappearances and a demonic entity plaguing the gay community of Toronto, but it’s also an autobiographical sketch of an author navigating death, survival, queer culture, horror as a means of expression, and more. In short, it’s an essential, and this new edition, complete with fresh writing by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Anthony Oliveira, is a must-have.
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