“Lost Nights and Dangerous Days”

Uncovering Stranger Things was one of the first/if not the first edited collection of scholarly essays focused on Stranger Things published. I was honored to contribute an essay called “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days” (trivia: “Dangerous Days” is a reference to the Perturbator album of the same name which in turn is a reference to a making of documentary about Blade Runner) to the anthology, which turned out to be an early academic essay focuses on synthwave music. Some generous soul referenced my essay on the Wikipedia entry of synthwave and because of that this essay has become my most cited publication.

Table of Contents of Uncovering Stranger Things

• “Introduction: Stranger (Things) in a Strange Land or, I Love the ’80s?” – Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr

Section I: Popular Culture

• “The Rebirth of King’s Children” – Ashley Jae Carranza
• “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days: Unraveling the Relationship Between Stranger Things and Synthwave” – Nicholas Diak
• “Transmissions from the Upside Down: Post-Punk Sound Waves in Stranger Things” – Jennifer Kirby
• “Competing Nostalgia and Popular Culture: Mad Men and Stranger Things” – Ryan Twomey
• “Stranger Things and Our Memories of Colombian TV in the Late Eighties: Bringing Back Alf, V.I.C.I., Evie and Guri-Guri” – Enrique ­Uribe-Jongbloed and Sergio ­Roncallo-Dow
• “Monsters and Moral Panics: Dungeons & Dragons as Force of Good in Stranger Things” – Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Section II: Cinema

• “The ­Eaten-for-Breakfast Club: Teenage Nightmares in Stranger Things” – Rose Butler
• “Women as Stranger Things: Frankensteinian Exploitation and Weaponization of Female Bodies” – Melissa A. Kaufler
• “Not a Princess Anymore: How the Casting of Winona Ryder in Stranger Things Speaks to the Essential Falsehood of 1980s Media Depictions of the American Working Class” – Lisa Morton
• “Stranger (The) Thing: Echoes of John Carpenter in the Series” – John Palisano
• “Spielberg Things: The Nostalgic Heart of Stranger Things” – Jacopo della Quercia

Section III: Gender and Orientation

• “Revisiting the Monstrous Feminine and Monster Parents in Stranger Things” – Elsa M. Carruthers
• “AIDS, Homophobia and the Monstrous Upside Down: The Queer Subtext of Stranger Things” – Emily E. Roach
• “The Monstrous Queer Child: Mobbing, Bullying and Bad Parenting in the 1980s” – Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Canela Ailén Rodriguez Fontao and Mariana S. Zárate
• “Gaslighting, Marginalization and the ­Well-Coiffed in Stranger Things” – Rhonda Jackson Joseph
• “Badass Mothers: Challenging Nostalgia” – Brenda Boudreau

Section IV: Society, Culture and Politics of the Eighties

• “Half-Lives of the Nuclear Family: Representations of the ­Mid-Century American Family in Stranger Things” – Anthony David Franklin
• “The Forgotten Rural: Bungling Police Officers and the Rise of Vigilantism in 1980’s Film, Culture and Stranger Things” – Dustin Freeley
• “’Should I Stay or Should I Go?’: Stranger Things and the ­In-Between” – Christine Muller
• “The Upside Down of Education Reform During the Reagan Era: A Re-Examination of Education Policies Through Stranger Things” – Ludovic A. Sourdot
• “’A nice home at the end of the ­cul-de-sac’: Hawkins as Infected Postmodern Suburbia” – Lacey N. Smith
• “The Nine Most Terrifying Words in the English Language” – Scott Wartham
• “The Strangest Thing About Stranger Things” – Jimmy Butts

Reviews of Uncovering Stranger Things / “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days”

Forthcoming.

Citations of “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days”

A list of texts that have cited “Lost Nights and Dangerous Days”:

“Anytime but now. Das kulturelle Umfeld von Synthwave” by David Hornyak.

“Arcade Summer – The ’80s Electronica Renaissance of Synthwave” by Christian Sellers at Love-It-Loud (Archive.org Copy or Article)

“GTA Vice City Created a New Wave of ’80s Nostalgia” by Karl Otty at SUPERJUMP.

Purchase

Uncovering Stranger Things can be purchased at the following venues:

• McFarland
• Amazon