SMELL: Eugene J. Candy Co.

The aroma inside Eugene J. Candy Co., a jewel-box confections store in Bushwick, is a combination of caramelized sugar, warm marshmallow, and bubblegum, undercut with tangy fruit. It’s a playful, perfumey, powdery smell, thick and smooth yet with a salty, sticky bite. It’s a scent that brings you right back to childhood evenings after trick-or-treating, pouring the contents of a plastic pumpkin bucket in a rattling cascade onto the floor, and pawing through the spoils as you work out trades with friends while idly sucking on a Dum-Dum. From the outside, the store gives no indication of being a candy shop. It’s painted black, the word “candy” is nowhere in sight, and a notice on the door warns “Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.” This seriousness is offset by the grinning jack o’lantern painted on the window and the black-and-orange sidewalk bunting, hints of the shop’s year-round Halloween theme, and in keeping with its owner’s winkingly subversive attitude toward his trade.

That’s Eugene J. in the back behind the counter: the owner, candy-maker, and sole employee. On October 31, he confides, his customers are mostly adults who feel like they are missing out on the trick-or-treating fun taking place on the sidewalks.

Inside, the pressed-tin ceiling is festooned with orange and black triangular flags like a jagged row of witches’ hats or excised pumpkin eyes. Paper spiders spin webs between crepe paper flowers and autumn leaves.

A skeleton perches atop a shelf wearing a pirate’s hat crowned with a black schooner that, Eugene says, he crafted of licorice when he served as a judge of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

Eugene’s small stature, welcoming smile, and gentle manner belie his taste for the extreme, which defines most of his pursuits, from his confections to his side gigs. In addition to judging the Mermaid Parade, he has played in a punk band and is a balloon handler in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, where he always prays for rain and wind to make the experience more intense. Born in Flushing, he graduated from Cooper Union in 2005 with a degree in chemical engineering, while experimenting with crafting candy at home and acquiring tools of the trade. (Cooper Union likes to showcase Eugene as an example of the myriad careers that can be pursued with an engineering degree.) After doing R&D for a countertop manufacturer, and following a stint in Berlin, where he sold homemade lollipops out of a briefcase outside a nightclub, he returned to New York to work in Big Sugar at Dylan’s Candy Bar. There, he acquired crucial skills and inspiration, while also realizing he wasn’t cut out for the corporate candy world. He finally opened his own candy shop in March 2016. That fall, right after Halloween, Hilary Clinton lost the presidential election, and Eugene experienced his first surge of customers seeking comfort—and perhaps an escape from reality—in sugar and in the store’s joyful whimsicality.

He began making his own candy at the shop a year later, in a back room behind a magician-like purple curtain. He now lives above the shop, and is down in his candy lab each day at four in the morning to tend to his concoctions; the shop opens at noon. In keeping with his training, Eugene keeps binders detailing each iteration of a recipe and the conditions under which different batches were made.

It’s no surprise that Eugene has been inspired by Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Worn copies of the middle-grade novel are tucked between the recipe binders behind the register, alongside thank-you notes from a local third-grade class that makes an annual visit to the real-world chocolate factory around the corner.

His customer base is decidedly not ten-year-olds but twenty- and thirtysomethings. Nevertheless, his lifelong admiration for Wonka, and his subversive inclinations, inspired him to craft candies for Wonka’s rivals in the book, among them a character named Fickelgruber, who steals Wonka’s secret recipes. Now Eugene is doing the same, though out of respect rather than malice. This experimentation led to one of his signature candies, FG. Freaks (the FG. is an abbreviation for Fickelgruber, but also open to interpreation). These are like Nerds but about ten times larger and bumpier.

Freaks come in an array of mainly citrus flavors. All Eugene’s homemade creations have a stamped wax seal on the container.

Other featured candies include milk-chocolate Gushers, fruit snacks with a spurt in the middle; dark-chocolate-covered Sour Patch Kids; milk chocolate Cheerios (limited edition); and milk-chocolate-coated Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which has a kick of cayenne pepper, a customer’s suggestion, and seem to be peering out of the jar with ghoulish eyes.

In addition to his own concoctions, he sells offbeat and horror-themed candy by small manufacturers, from wax fangs, gummy brains, and Sour Boxes of Boogers, to Sour Patch Kids Zombies, Reese’s Werewolf Tracks, and Nerds Spooky Ropes. Alongside these are niche and international varieties like El Bubble, Wacky Wafers, Cry Baby Sour Mini Drinks, GooGoo Clusters, and Jimmie Stix.

Like in a flower shop, most customers arrive in a cheerful mood. As we chat, a guy in skinny jeans and a trucker hat—Bushwick local from central casting—wanders in and begins filling baggies with candies, as if he knows exactly what he’s come for. As Eugene is ringing him up, he holds out his hand. “Dropped a gummy bear,” he says, then pauses. “I didn’t want it to just, like, sit on the floor.”

It’s clear that each candy here is a miniature treasure, with a personality of its own and sometimes even a face. Between his daily candy-making and candy-selling, all in the same building, Eugene admits he doesn’t have time for much else in his life. “Having a spooky store with crooked shelves, mismatched bins, and in perfectly imperfect order is such an escape for me,” he told me. “I say it’s my therapy.” Perhaps that’s why he’s drawn to experimentation and to pushing the boundaries of familiar candies—and candy narrative—to rebellious extremes. “Time passes so quickly,” he muses, gazing out through the grinning jack o’lantern on the window. “I just keep sitting here in my store every day, and I feel like I’m staying the same, but the world outside keeps changing.”

Eugene J. Candy Co. is located at 16 Wilson Avenue, Brooklyn.