Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Harlan Coben’s Shelter’ On Prime Video, Where A Teen Uncovers Dark Secrets In His New Jersey Town

Many of Harlan Coben‘s mystery novels have been adapted for streaming over the past few years, but Harlan Coben’s Shelter represents the first of his YA-oriented novels to get an adaptation. It’s also one of the few adaptations that stays in its source novel’s original location of the New Jersey suburbs.

HARLAN COBEN’S SHELTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A large, creepy house. “NEW JERSEY. 1998.” A group of kids are in the house, and as the Kassleton, NJ police show up, they go into a bunker. The leader of the group is an older teen named Brad.

The Gist: Twenty-five years later, Brad Bolitar (Kristoffer Polaha) is in Santa Monica with his wife Kitty (Narci Regina) and son Mickey (Jaden Michael). Brad is on his phone leaving a message that they’re “back in the States,” indicating that they lived overseas for years.

They’re in Santa Monica because Mickey was going to be going to a school with a good basketball program. But those plans are short-circuited when a big truck t-bones their car at a pretty high speed. Mickey, hanging upside down from the front seat, sees his barely conscious father carted off in an ambulance.

Four months later, Mickey is now living in Kassleton, NJ, waking up in a room laden with his uncle’s basketball trophies. He’s living with his aunt Shira (Constance Zimmer), Brad’s sister. Brad didn’t make it after the accident; Kitty managed to recover but is apparently either physically or emotionally unable to take care of Mickey. Shira, a busy attorney, isn’t exactly the parenting type, as she even burns toaster waffles.

As he walks to school, he hears the song that was playing in the car he wasn in with his parents before the accident; it’s coming from the old creepy house nearby, and he sees an old lady in the window. He’s greeted on the way to his first day of school by a charming, dorky kid named Arthur Spindell (Adrian Greensmith), who is part of a school group that helps show new kids the ropes. At an assembly for the new kids, he meets Ashley Kent (Samantha Bugliaro), another new kid, and they seem to hit it off immediately. He also meets basketball captain Troy Taylor (Brian Altemus) and his girlfriend Rachel Caldwell (Sage Linder). Mickey and Ashley plan to meet at a diner later.

After a pickup game with the basketball team turns out to stir up some emotions in Mickey, he admits to Arthur that since his dad died, he feels like “he never played”, which is why he doesn’t want to join the team at his new school. When he goes by the creepy house again, she sees the creepy old lady, which the town knows as Bat Lady (Tovah Feldshuh) on the porch; she not only knows his name, but also tells him that his father is actually still alive. He goes to knock on the door and he’s confronted by another student, Ema Winslow (Abby Corrigan).

Ashley doesn’t show up for their diner date, and Mickey pounds on the door of the Bat Lady’s house to find out just what the heck is going on. He’s arrested by Troy’s dad, the town’s chief of police (Lee Aaron Rosen). When Shira comes to pick him up from the station, she tells him about how his father went into that house and people thought he’d go missing like a kid named Dylan Shakes did back in the mid-’90s.

When Ashley doesn’t show up to school the next day, Mickey recruits Arthur (who wants everyone to call him “Spoon” now, because he carries around a spoon-fork combo) and Ema to help him explore the Bat Lady’s house. He not only finds the album that had the song that was playing during the accident — complete with a butterfly on the cover — but a mirror that Ashley stuck in her locker was sitting on a shelf. As Mickey makes connections, Ema abruptly leaves, but when Mickey and Arthur go to what they think is Ashley’s house, things get even more mysterious.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though Harlan Coben’s Shelter is based on the first book of the Coben’s Mickey Bolitar book series, the show has the same feeling as other teen mystery shows like Stranger Things, One Of Us Is Lying, Yellowjackets, School Spirits, etc.

Our Take: Coben is heavily involved in Shelter, writing the first few episodes and acting as co-showrunner with Allen MacDonald and Patricia Cardoso. It certainly shows in how layered the story is, and the fact that the show sticks to the original novel’s New Jersey setting (it was even shot in various locations around the Garden State).

The show wants to be a Stranger Things-style mystery, that has some weird goings-on in Kasselton that Mickey, Spoon and Ema band together to uncover. The goings-on may not be monster related, but there is assuredly something supernatural — and definitely criminal — afoot. But the first episode bogs down in trying to present these layers of mystery, giving viewers too much information in some areas at the sacrifice of information in others.

For instance, while waiting for cheerleading tryouts, Ashley opens what we think is her bag, and we see a gun in it. A teacher takes a picture of her and texts it to someone, and we see him against the New York skyline looking at the response: “Find her.” It’s pretty obvious that Ashley is either up to no good or trying to protect herself from people that are up to no good.

But we didn’t even get enough time to wrap our minds around that part of the story before we were trying to figure out why Bat Lady knows so much about Mickey and his family. Yes, we remembered that scene from 25 years prior, but the only real information that gave us was that Brad was in that house quite a bit. We also know that Shira didn’t tell Mickey the whole story about their family’s history with the Bat Lady and that house.

We do realize that the Ashley mystery and the Bat Lady are related, given a scene late in the premiere where Bat Lady gets info from the teacher who was tracking Ashley. But we just get a weird vibe that whatever information that’s being held back from us isn’t going to advance the story as much as we think.

That being said, we do like the team of Mickey, Spoon and Ema, who all have different connections to this mystery, and we hope that we’re not led through tons of red herrings before we get real answers to just what the hell is going on.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After getting a henchman to kill the teacher tracking Ashley, Bat Lady looks at a blood-spattered framed photo of Mickey and his family.

Sleeper Star: We’ll use this space to mention that Didi Conn plays Mrs. Friedman, a history teacher that seems to know more about the mysteries in the town than she lets on at first. She works all the time, but we’re still happy to see her whenever she shows up.

Most Pilot-y Line: “You’re the reason he’s dead!” Mickey yells to Shira after being stood up by Ashley. He’s referring to his father and the fact that they had to move overseas because Shira hated Mickey’s mother so much. That’s a little piece of mystery that we hope is revisited at some point.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We wish Harlan Coben’s Shelter gave us a bit more of a cohesive story in its early going instead of what feels like taking all of its mysteries and putting them in a storytelling blender. But the charm of the leads and the fact that the mystery has multiple layers give us hope that as things are revealed, the storytelling will become a bit less frenzied.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.