Books Like Stranger Things: 9 Reads for 80s Nostalgia and Small-Town Horror
Kids on bikes, government labs and things in the woods: what to read between seasons
Stranger Things works because it welds two things together perfectly: the warm glow of a 1980s childhood (bikes, basements, walkie-talkies, Dungeons and Dragons on a Friday night) and the cold certainty that something in the woods wants to eat you. Hawkins gives us kids who face the monster because the adults will not, a government lab doing something unforgivable behind chain-link fencing, and a small town where everyone's secrets are load-bearing. The horror matters because the friendships matter first.
That blend did not come from nowhere. The Duffer Brothers built the show out of a very specific shelf of books, and that shelf is one of our favourites to walk customers along at Ever After Books. Here are nine reads, from the show's direct ancestors to its sharpest modern cousins.
What to read if you love Stranger Things
IT by Stephen King
The clearest single source of the show's DNA. Seven outcast kids in the small town of Derry, Maine, band together against an ancient shape-shifting evil that the adults refuse to see, and the losers' club friendship is every bit as vivid as the horror. It is a doorstop, but the summer-of-1958 sections read like the show's Hawkins scenes with the saturation turned up. If you only take one book from this list, take this one.
The Institute by Stephen King
And here is the other half of the show: the lab. Children with telekinetic and telepathic gifts are abducted to a facility where staff in lanyards run them through tests, and one boy plots a way out. It is essentially the Eleven storyline expanded to a full novel, written with late-period King efficiency. Colder and angrier than IT, and very hard to put down.
Find The Institute at Ever After Books
Summer of Night by Dan Simmons
Illinois, 1960: five boys discover that something ancient has woken beneath their soon-to-be-demolished school, and spend the summer holidays fighting it with bikes, squirt guns and nerve. Simmons captures the exact texture of a childhood summer, the boredom and the freedom, then floods it with dread. Of everything here, this is the novel that feels most like watching season one for the first time.
Find Summer of Night at Ever After Books
Boy's Life by Robert McCammon
A boy in small-town Alabama in 1964 sees a car go into a lake with a dead man handcuffed inside, and the mystery unspools through a year of his life where magic and murder sit side by side. Less monster-driven than the show, more openly nostalgic, and quite possibly the best small-town childhood novel ever written. Read it for the feeling Stranger Things gives you in its quiet episodes, the ones about growing up.
Find Boy's Life at Ever After Books
Paper Girls, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang
Four newspaper delivery girls in 1988 suburbia pedal straight into a sky full of impossible things in the early hours after Halloween. It is a comic rather than a novel, and it swaps supernatural horror for full-tilt science fiction, but the crew dynamics, the period detail and the kids-versus-the-inexplicable energy are pure Hawkins. Chiang's art and the neon colour palette make it the most 80s object on this list.
Find Paper Girls, Volume 1 at Ever After Books
My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Charleston, 1988: Abby's best friend Gretchen goes into the woods one night and comes back wrong, and only Abby notices. Hendrix plays the possession story through mixtapes, roller rinks and school assemblies, and every chapter is named after an 80s song. Funnier than the show, then suddenly much nastier, and underneath it all a genuinely moving story about the ferocity of teenage friendship.
Find My Best Friend's Exorcism at Ever After Books
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
A teen detective club solved its last case in 1977, and it did not stay solved. Thirteen years on, the surviving members, now broken adults, go back to the lake town that ruined them to face what was really wearing the villain's mask. It is a loving demolition of Scooby-Doo with genuine cosmic horror underneath, and it answers a question the show also loves: what happens to the kids on bikes when they grow up?
Find Meddling Kids at Ever After Books
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
Vic McQueen discovers as a girl that her bike can carry her across an impossible bridge to wherever lost things are, and that gift puts her in the path of Charlie Manx, who spirits children away to a place called Christmasland. Hill (King's son, and it shows in the best way) builds the same bridge the show does between childhood wonder and adult horror, and his other world is as memorable a creation as the Upside Down.
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Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
No kids and no 80s here, but if the Hawkins lab and the gates between worlds are your favourite part of the show, this is your book. A physics lecturer is abducted and wakes up in a life that is not his, on the wrong side of an experiment involving parallel realities. Crouch writes propulsive, high-concept science thrillers you finish in two sittings, and this is the best gateway into them.
Find Dark Matter at Ever After Books
Keep the streak going
The gate stays open. Tell What Should I Read Next? which of these sounds most like your Hawkins and it will find you another, pin the rest to your TBR list, and take a torch into our Horror collection for more small towns with bad secrets.