Books: Meddling Kids By Edgar Cantero (2017)

"1990. The teen detectives once known as the Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in the Zoinx River Valley in Oregon) are all grown up and haven't seen each other since their fateful, final case in 1977. Andy, the tomboy, is twenty-five and on the run, wanted in at least two states. Kerri, one-time kid genius and budding biologist, is bartending in New York, working on a serious drinking problem. At least she's got Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the team. Nate, the horror nerd, has spent the last thirteen years in and out of mental health institutions, and currently resides in an asylum in Arhkam, Massachusetts. The only friend he still sees is Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star. The problem is, Peter's been dead for years. The time has come to uncover the source of their nightmares and return to where it all began in 1977. This time, it better not be a man in a mask. The real monsters are waiting."

The basic premise of Meddling Kids is taken from Scooby-Doo, of course, the classic animated series that featured a plucky group of “teens” and a dog solving mysteries in their Mystery Machine. Of course, much like the Blyton Summer Detective Club (a reference to prolific British children's writer Enid Blyton), their mysteries always ended with a guy in a costume. However here, we get a glimpse of what happens when reality takes over, as it borrows a lot of its atmosphere from more adult work, including Netflix’s Stranger Things and, as always, Stephen King.

But while all the tropes of the genre are here, including many Easter eggs for readers (and the folks who like HP Lovecraft are in store for a fun ride) the book does become less about solving a thirteen year-old mystery and more about growing up.

Here, in Edgar Cantero’s second novel he’s written in English (he started out in his native Spain) we get a spot on satire, that is often a very intelligent story about what happens between our childhoods and when we become adults. While Cantero’s prose style can be jarring (and it took a long time for me to get used to it), he juxtapositions some funny, nostalgic humor with some dark glimpses into the survival mode people go into to reconcile some trauma in their lives.

But the book does become a bit relentless as it progresses, as Cantero throws everything but the kitchen sink in the last quarter of the book -sometime devolving into cartoonish behavior that had me rolling my eyes. But it’s fun book for people who grew up on Scooby Doo, Cthulhu, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and the many books by Enid Blyton.