While Last Girls Standing introduces us to a world where preternatural horrors may or may not truly exist, Flight of Icarus, the upcoming novel from Stranger Things scribe Caitlin Schneiderhan, takes us back to the familiar climes of Hawkins, Indiana—a land obviously rife with other-dimensional evil. Interestingly enough, though, none of the series’ supernatural forces make themselves felt in this tale.

Sure, there are passing references to the missing Barbara Holland and that seemingly-returned-from-the-dead “Byers kid” (who does actually pop up alongside his older brother in the book’s waning moments), but don’t expect to encounter any roving Demogorgons or other denizens of the Upside Down in the pages of Stranger Things: Flight of Icarus.

In fact, aside from a handful of schoolyard encounters, you won’t see much of the big-name families of Stranger Things lore either. This tale, instead, focuses on the everyday horrors of fan-favorite Eddie Munson, providing us with his tragic backstory and priming the proverbial pump for him to become the hero we all know him to be by the close of Stranger Things‘ electrifying fourth season.

With all his time spent shepherding the Hellfire Club, gigging with his band Corroded Coffin, and serving as barback at Hawkins’ seediest dive, the young Munson doesn’t have a lot of time for much else. Like being a star pupil of 1984, for example.

Instead, he spends his downtime between D&D adventures and guitar-slinging in the orbit of only a handful of allies, specifically his bandmates and his stoic uncle Wayne Munson, while routinely taking it on the chin from a town that has already written him off as a lost cause.

All this changes with the introduction of Paige, a small-town Hawkins girl with a fortuitous connection to an LA record exec. She thinks a Corroded Coffin demo tape could kickstart Eddie’s ascension to rock god status, but that costs money the gang doesn’t have.

This sets the stage for the return of Al Munson, Eddie’s absentee father, a career criminal whose unfortunate legacy has already doomed Eddie in the eyes of Hawkins’ residents. Al has a line on a new get-rich-quick scheme, but he needs his son’s help.

Tempted by the promise of fast cash, Eddie agrees to help his father steal product from a big-time drug kingpin’s marijuana caravan as it passes through the Midwest. And everything goes according to plan… until it doesn’t.

The strength of Flight of Icarus is twofold. First, everybody loves Eddie Munson. We’ve already seen the very height of his narrative trajectory as well as its heartbreaking resolution. Second, it deals with the sort of mundane evil that we sometimes tend to gloss over in a universe where otherworldly existential threats lurk around every corner.

Eddie Munson is hamstrung by poverty, by abandonment, by a town and school system that has already written him off for the literal sins of his father. Further, he is bullied, vilified by the growing satanic panic, and belittled at every opportunity by a community that feels certain it would be better off without him. (If they only knew!)

Licensed books sometimes get a bad rap and prequels are, in this modern era, a dime a dozen, but Stranger Things: Flight of Icarus manages to buck all that and tell a story that fans will actually want to read about one of Hawkins’ most misunderstood sons.