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. 

Books: Expecting Someone Taller by Tom Holt (1987)

“Malcolm Fisher inherits a magic ring from a dying badger and becomes the much-disputed Ruler of the World. Everyone wants the ring--despite the fearsome curse upon it. And Malcolm is about to learn that some are born to greatness, and some are, well, badgered into it.”

Way back in the 1980s, ACE Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press, released a lot of humorous fantasy novels (along with some serious ones) to counter the many other fantasy novels that Del Ray was putting out. Most were okay, parodies mostly of The Lord of The Rings, or just books that took the genre less seriously. After stumbling upon Tom Holt’s Expecting Someone Taller at Sideshow Books here in West LA, I can’t remember if I saw this book when it was released in 1987. At the time, I was deep into many series fantasy books and would, on occasion, read the more sillier books that came out, like Craig Shaw Gardner’s Ebenezum series (and a few others he wrote), John DeChanice’s Castle Perilous series, and Myth Adventures by Robert Lynn Asprin. Sprinkled within was (at least) the first ten volumes of Piers Anthony’s Xanth books.

Anyways, there was a lot, and there is a good chance either I saw the book and was not interested or missed it completely. So while the book has its charms and a promising premise (taking the characters and themes of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and setting them in a modern day sleepy English village), it never really took off for me. The humor is never laugh-out-loud, but it also never really gels into typical satire the British seem to do so well at. Still, this was Holt’s first novel and has spent the last 30 years writing humorous takes on every myth, fairy tale, and supernatural aspect that you can shake a leg at. He’s been pretty prolific and it surprises me that I’ve never heard of him.

So I might excuse Holt for failing to make the most of his initial premise because it was his first book, but on the other hand, since it falls short –for me anyways- to live up to its premise, I don’t find myself invested enough to move into the many other books he’s written.

Which makes me wonder if I had discovered him back in 1987, would have I continued to read his books like I’ve done with Stephen King? But then again, like many of those fantasy books I read a thousand years ago, I’ve stopped reading a lot of those authors, like Terry Brooks, Piers Anthony, Stephen R. Donaldson, David Eddings (though dead I never read anything else of his beyond The Belgariad and The Malloreon series), and Raymond E. Feist. Even Robert Asprin continued to write more Myth books in collaboration with author Jodi Lynn Nye until his death in 2008.

I realized that part of me has moved on from the genre, which is highly predictable. But also, part of me realizes that those books were read when I was a lost boy, trying to find my place in the world. They filled the empty hours of my life. Much like the world, I’ve moved on, and only on occasions, do I dip my toes back into this genre. Sometimes I disappointment myself.

Books: The Outsider By Stephen King (2018)

The first half of The Outsider, the latest big novel by Stephen King, seemingly returns to detective thriller trilogy he wrote, Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. But while it is a crime story –taking a page from every forensic novel and TV series of last few decades- there is more to this story than a horrific murder of a child.

“Ralph Anderson, a detective in Flint City, Okla., orders the arrest of a popular local English teacher and Little League coach, Terry Maitland, at a baseball game packed with cheering families. Anderson has clear evidence that Maitland raped and mutilated a child. The crime is awful but the proximity — the sense of trust that Maitland enjoyed — is what truly horrifies the detective. So the officers arrest the coach in front of everyone, announcing the charges loudly. As he’s led away, Maitland insists, just as loudly, that he’s innocent. Maitland has a foolproof alibi, though, with footage to prove that he was in another city when the crime was committed. But sadly, that doesn't save him. So from a miscalculated arraignment circus, and importantly, the video tape and reliable witnesses who put Terry somewhere else, Ralph Anderson begins to have doubts. Rather reluctantly, and after an associate of Terry’s lawyer Howie Gold contacts Holly Gibney to help clear Maitland’s name, does it become clear that something supernatural is happening in Flint City. But Anderson still has problems with this, but with the guilt eating at him that maybe Terry Maitland was innocent, Ralph begins a dark path towards something that has now taken up residence in a small Texas town.”

Again, King creates a reliable, well paced physiological/horror thriller. The fact that he sets it up in Oklahoma and Texas, and not his beloved state of Maine, is intriguing in many ways. There is a metaphor here, something that King notes in his Authors Note: “Oklahoma is a wonderful state, and I met wonderful people there. Some of those wonderful people will say I got a lot wrong, and I probably did; you have to be in place for years before you get the flavor right.” Everyone, including whatever the thing is that’s killing kids (a shape-shifter that many of the writers Constant Readers will see as a variation on monster in IT. King does not go into any detail about what this monster is, where it comes from, why it exists, but either he didn't feel the need to or we're bound to run into this monster in a novel yet to be written), becomes an outsider during the run of the book; each understanding that while we may all be connected, share similar thoughts and ideas, when we go somewhere, local customs and stories do change. But still, at its core, The Outsider is about understanding the mystery of the universe and how all of try to make it make sense. It takes Anderson a long time to accept the idea that what they’re dealing with is something beyond science. Also the welcome return of Holly from that previous trilogy, who tries to convince the cop that there can be something darker lurking outside Ralph’s black and white perception that is wonderfully handled.

This is what Stephen King has always excelled at, and makes him a wonderful story teller.

Books: Surrender the Pink By Carrie Fisher (1990)

”Two years after the breakup of her marriage to award-winning playwright Rudy Gendler, Dinah Kaufman remains in limbo, not really wanting him back but lacking a satisfying stand-in. So, idled by a writers' strike, she tails Rudy and his current love, the compliant Lindsey, to the Hamptons. Dinah proves to be the prototypical ‘new woman’' in her uncertainties and gender confusions; she finds it hard to relinquish the ‘pink’ girlish fantasy that a man will indeed secure her happiness ever after. She knows she always seems to love men who later leave her, but understanding this and changing her life for the better pose two distinctly different challenges.”

There are a lot of funny bits in Surrender the Pink, the second novel Fisher wrote after the success of Postcards From the Edge. Dinah is smart, sarcastic, worldly, as well as sad. There are some rather touching bits, as well, and I could help but not feel somewhat connected to the character and the writer. I was also sort of stunned by an exchange about women’s roles in society, and realize more so, that in the near 28 years since this book was released, nothing much has changed. I can see why Carrie Fisher like gay men –they treated her with the respect and love she needed.

This book, also, is long rumored to be loosely based on Fisher’s relationship and short marriage to singer Paul Simon. If it is, both come off fairly evenly here; Fisher does not seem to have too much of an ax to grind. It does highlight, though, what a wonderful, witty woman Fisher was and what we lost when she so unexpectedly left us in 2016.

Books: Off To Be The Wizard By Scott Meyer (2012)

"Martin Banks is just a normal guy who has made an abnormal discovery: he can manipulate reality, thanks to reality being nothing more than a computer program. With every use of this ability, though, Martin finds his little “tweaks” have not escaped notice. Rather than face prosecution, he decides instead to travel back in time to the Middle Ages and pose as a wizard. What could possibly go wrong? An American hacker in King Arthur’s court, Martin must now train to become a full-fledged master of his powers, discover the truth behind the ancient wizard Merlin… and not, y’know, die or anything."

While certainly not an original premise (A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court comes to mind, as well as TRON), Scott Meyer’s Off To Be The Wizard is often imaginative, clever, and well written. I’m also assuming people with advanced knowledge of computers will understand the mechanics of Meyer’s world building here. The humor is regularly funny, and the situations mildly silly, but the book does flow very easily and never tips into parody (which is hard when doing a parody of this genre).

The characters are fun as well, though I found Martin to be a bit unlikeable for most of the book, while finding Phillip (the wizard he first meets in the Middle Ages) to be far more three-dimensional and interesting. Then there is Jimmy, modern day nerd who is living in the past. The problem with Jimmy, for me, was that it’s no huge surprise he becomes the villain of this first book in this series. Meyer tries to give us some misdirection, tries to make Phillip seem guilty, but it comes down to how Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson made Jack Torrance from the movie version of The Shining pretty crazy from the start. In Stephen King’s book, it’s a slow turn from loving family man to possessed killer that Jack goes through. But in the film, it’s clear the moment Jack appears, the audience knows he’s already a few tacos short of a combination platter. Same with Jimmy, as Meyer writes the character a bit over the top; trying a bit too hard to convince the reader that Jimmy is sane. And it’s obvious from his introduction he is loony tunes. The ending is a bit anti-climatic, as well, but logical (and offers one of a few moral messages within the book) for these nerds. 

And again, I start another series, with four books out now, and a fifth due this summer. Seems no matter how I try, I find myself circling back to multi-volume books.