Nevanna's Forest of Stories

These are five of the books or series that were foundational to my mind control obsession.

1. The Witch Herself (1978) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The subject line of this post is from a song that recurs throughout Naylor’s “Witch” books.

I discussed this series last year, during Spooky Season, but I chose to single out this particular book (the third out of six) because it’s the one in which protagonist Lynn’s best friend, Mouse, declares her intention to be a hypnotist. After minimal study, she can put people in trances, control their actions, and access repressed memories. She also communicates with Lynn’s internal shadow self; it’s suggested that everybody has one, and that some witches - as well as an amateur hypnotist, apparently - can control these aspects of their victims by learning their secret names. (That part was, for better or for worse, also tremendously fascinating to me as a young reader.)

Mouse’s hypnotism is not part of the latter three books, in a series that is generally very smart about continuity and callbacks. The possible Watsonian reason is that she’s understandably frightened of her own power, but to the best of my recollection, it’s never even mentioned again.

2. The Ghastly Glasses (1985) by Beatrice Gormley

A psychic researcher posing as an optometrist gives young Andrea a pair of glasses that allows her to change people’s personalities when she looks through them.

This book is the sequel to Mail-Order Wings, which I haven’t read, but works pretty well as a stand-alone. It has a solid “be careful what you wish for” message and a very funny ending that would probably please cat lovers. I remember stealing one of its plot threads (minus the glasses) for my own long-ago attempt at a Psychic Kid story, about which I can unfortunately remember very little now.

3. Animorphs (1996-2001) by K.A. Applegate

Most of my peers probably at least know the hook for this series (written by spouses Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, along with a team of ghostwriters): five kids are given the power to transform into animals in order to fight an invasion by parasitic mind-controlling aliens. Although I never actually finished reading all the books, they were overwhelmingly formative for me while I was following them, and the horror of Yeerk infestation – both from the inside, when it happens to the team leader at one point, and from the outside – was a huge part of the reason why.

4. Extreme Zone (1997-1998) by M.C. Sumner

When her father’s secret scientific research leads to his disappearance from the military base where they live, Harley teams up with Noah, a classmate suffering from nightmares of what might be an alien abduction, to investigate.

There are satisfying amounts of mind control in this series, but it also contains: conspiracies, astral projection, interdimensional travel, clairvoyant visions, cults, shapeshifting, genetic engineering and other forms of Weird Science, and lots of questions that – even though the story seems to come to some sort of conclusion in its eight-book run – are never really resolved. Given the time frame of its publication, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was partly inspired by The X-Files. And unlike Animorphs, which is a generation-defining phenomenon, I have never met another person who’s read Extreme Zone. It doesn’t fall into the category of “do I remember reading this or did I hallucinate it?” that happens sometimes with childhood favorites – you can find and buy copies online, and I held onto my own collection – but some elements of the story, which are both surreal and specific, as well as its relative obscurity and the fact that I was only ever able to find most of the books exclusively at one independent bookstore in upstate New York, make me feel like a lot of adults probably do when processing those half-formed memories of nostalgic media.

5. Daughters of the Moon (2000-2007) by Lynne Ewing

Four (later, five) teenage girls use their supernatural powers to fight a demon and its human (and not-quite-human) thralls.

As a teenager, I already recognized that these books were kind of awkwardly written, not to mention morally uneven when it came to excusable applications of mind control (it was okay when the good guys did it!), and I didn’t care. As I wrote on Tumblr some years ago, the series scratched my itch for sensual descriptions of psychic contact as well as an enemies-to-lovers romance with a tormented immortal bad boy. Even then, I knew what I liked.

I said that I’d share my top five “mind control episodes” of live action TV, so here they are, in chronological order.

1. “The Tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (Are You Afraid of the Dark?): If you aren’t familiar with this show, it was an anthology horror series (with a framing device of kids telling each other spooky stories) that aired in the 1990s. In this story, a misfit teen became the thrall of a long-dead wizard, who gave him power over other people’s minds, allowing him to rally his classmates and teachers into what was effectively a cult, and leaving his best friend as the only voice of reason. This episode nailed “high school dynamics BUT SPOOKY” years before Buffy, and it’s one that I can rewatch with a full recognition of why I loved it in the first place.

2. “Stop-Loss” (Dollhouse): Even before Joss Whedon’s work (justifiably) underwent a widespread critical re-evaluation, this show – about an organization that uses science fiction technology for what is essentially human trafficking – was received with noticeable skepticism. I didn’t actually watch it until years after it aired, and while I could and still can understand where the criticism comes from, a lot of the show’s component parts still really work for me, especially the love story between Tony (aka Victor) and Priya (aka Sierra). Late in Season 2, Tony got co-opted by a military hive-mind after leaving the Dollhouse, and although the episode zipped through what would probably have worked better as a longer character arc, the scenes in which Priya tried to remind him of who he was (although she only sort of understood that herself) still managed to hit my emotional buttons.

(I don’t think Dollhouse should be rebooted, but I do think there were ways to tweak continuity that might have resolved some of its issues. Maybe I’ll write about those someday.)

3. “A Sin to Err” (Agent Carter): The first season of this show consisted of eight episodes that told a continuous story, and the sixth episode showed what the primary villain – a psychiatrist who, of course, used hypnosis to trap people in illusions – was really capable of. I vividly remember my “are they really going for… yes they are!” reaction when he started telling another character to “focus,” and he is one of the reasons why I ended up writing so much fic in this fandom. (The very last moments of the very last episode implied that he was involved in the Winter Soldier experiments, but I don’t think that future MCU content took that idea anywhere, though I could be wrong.)

4. “Myriad” and “Better Angels” (Supergirl): The two-part finale of Season 1, in which the Kryptonian antagonist mind-controls (almost) the entire population of a city including several of the title character’s loved ones, is a delicious feast of tropes and undiluted sincerity, and makes no apologies.

5. “The Hellfire Club” (Stranger Things): This is a different flavor of mind control than the ones listed previously, but Vecna uses his victims’ fears and insecurities to manipulate their perceptions and trap them in nightmares, so I think it qualifies. I find his victims more sympathetic and the related imagery more interesting than what the Mind Flayer did in the previous season (though that storyline did have a couple of nicely creepy scenes, like the one in which Billy visited Heather and her parents). That said, none of the mind stuff in this show has disappointed me.

Since I support This Week in Fandom History on Patreon, I have access to their behind-the-scenes episodes, which are less focused on a particular topic than the ones in the main show, and often consist of the hosts nerding out about whatever strikes their fancy. (I usually dislike extensive tangents in other podcasts, but I'm okay with unfocused rambling if I know it's what I signed up for.) Sometimes they talk about books that were popular during their formative years, which were also my formative years. And if I had a nickel for every time Emily and V mentioned an installment of a YA pulp series that I needed to seek out immediately because it featured some form of mind control, despite never having read the series as a Youth, I would have two nickels. Which is not a lot of money but it's weird awesome that it happened twice.

The first one is Murder in Paradise, a Sweet Valley High Super Thriller, in which the Wakefield twins, their mom, and their best friends take a vacation at a spa, whose owner has a sinister agenda that involves plastic surgery and (most relevant to my interests) hypnotism. I was able to find a copy on the Internet Archive.

The second one is The Nancy Drew Files #80, Power of Suggestion, in which (I am led to understand) a supporting character gets involved in college psychology experiments that essentially turn him into a brainwashed sleeper agent. This one is proving a little bit harder to track down; it seems like my options at this point are Interlibrary Loan, ThriftBooks, or a used bookstore quest (the last of which can be extremely enjoyable in its own right).

But, when I was talking about this with Elle, I said something about mind control melodrama in The Baby-Sitters Club (which I did read when I was younger), and we somehow generated a fanfiction premise in which Claudia's sister, Janine, who canonically takes college courses despite being eternally in high school, becomes a brainwashed sleeper agent through some campus research project. We decided that her trigger was a math equation, and didn't speculate much further than that, but I am very tempted to write this fic now. (Since the original podcast conversation kept referencing the Winter Soldier, I keep wanting to call this a "crossover," but it doesn't necessarily have to be one.)