Andraste

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.