Reviews
‘Candy Land’ Review – Truck Stop Slasher Explores Sex and Violence
Grimy truck stops serve as prime real estate in horror. The setting invokes a sense of desolate lawlessness as strangers pass through a revolving door of anonymity. Don’t even bother entering the filthy, unkept bathrooms; bad things always happen there. It’s precisely this setting where Candy Land unfurls its sleazy slasher filled with broken dreams, religious repression, and a sensitive depiction of sex workers right before a grim turn.
Candy Land introduces Sadie (Sam Quartin) and Liv (Virginia Rand), Riley (Eden Brolin), and Levi (Owen Campbell), a group of tight-knit sex workers dubbed “lot lizards.” They live out of the motel and spend their days chatting near the gas station, snowballs and soda in hand, in between sexual encounters in bathroom stalls or truck cabs. The lot lizards are presided over by Madame Nora (Guinevere Turner) and morally ambiguous Sheriff Rex (William Baldwin). Then the lot lizards find virginal Remy (Olivia Luccardi) crying on a bench after getting cast out by her religious cult and take her under their wing. Remy finds herself caught between her devout beliefs and their dangerous line of trade.
Writer/Director John Swab submerses viewers into this seedy little pocket of Middle America. Swab takes his time establishing this world and its inhabitants, bringing a more tender approach to its sex workers. The lot lizards exude warmth and camaraderie, a warped yet loving family amidst the squalor. They pay Remy’s nervous naivete no mind as they teach her the ins and outs of the unspoken truck stop system and quickly band together when dangers are afoot.
It’s this humanizing depiction and world building that bolsters a familiar setup. Once all characters and setting are thoroughly established, the dead bodies begin to accrue. It marks the tipping point from sensitive portrayal into a grim, bloody path of broken dreams and hearts. It’s also where Swab struggles to reign in the various threads through anchor Remy. The dangers of their profession, including harrowing encounters, combined with Remy’s erratic behavior in her attempts to assimilate, serve as compelling distractions from the fact that too much gets withheld from her backstory- one that’s crucial to her arc.
Swab succeeds in giving his lot lizards impactful individual arcs that resonate with their conclusions. Campbell, who starred in 2022’s X, stands out as the lot lizard’s sole male member Levi. Levi and his various encounters, particularly with the Sheriff, provide the most in terms of stakes and vulnerability. Luccardi, fresh off an intense and disturbing turn in Soft & Quiet, makes for a successful narrative catalyst as the emotionally volatile and increasingly unstable Remy. Yet Remy never manages to instill enough empathy for the third act to resonate fully. Nor does Candy Land fully explore the competing concepts it introduces.
Still, Candy Land gives a refreshing perspective through its condemnation of religion and its positioning of sex workers as protagonists. It’s a more nuanced and lived-in approach to the sleazy slasher format, and its affecting characters elevate the familiar. Much like the lot lizards themselves, Swab uses pink credits, classic needle drops, and Christmas cheer to belie something far more brutal and grim. It results in a flawed but compelling entry in backroads Americana horror.
Candy Land is available in select theaters and VOD now.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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