Book Notes: Meddling Kids

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
Read Oct 25, 2021 - Oct 30, 2021
⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meddling Kids is a Scooby Doo / Enid Blyton mashup-spoof full of adventure, humor, and pop culture references. The teen detectives – complete with nerdy redhead and a dog – are now in their twenties. After years of being haunted by the strange events in their last case, they return to the scene to get to the bottom of things. They find a much changed little town (named, subtly, Blyton Hills).

The characters are a lot more three-dimensional than I expected from such a story. We see the shadows behind the amusing hijinks and the ridiculous villains in cheesy costumes. There is trauma, insanity and suicide.

A Lovecraftian horror, long documented by the ancestral inhabitants of the land, undergirds it all. No, they didn’t imagine the monsters. And now a hundreds-year old villain (who makes a living writing lesbian erotica) is trying to bring it back. Because they can and because they are bored. The plan foiled, the town saved, the detectives make off with some gold (spoilers!). Meddling pays off.

Book Highlights

That was about the sum of the benefits of being institutionalized: living with crazier people helped put things into perspective.

Some form of unremarkable weather, profoundly commonplace for meteorologists but somehow relevant to the overall color of the scene, was taking place. Let us say soft rain and sunshine; let us say lightningless, borborygmic thunder.

She was joyfully drowning in Kerri’s hair, its fragrance and softness pounding on her senses like a cheerful Mongol army banging on the gates of Baghdad.

“Looks like the place of an old lady who never got married.” “That’s Puritan for ‘witch,’ ” Nate said, and he knocked again.

Never cry about a gun. Sadly it’s one of the easiest things to replace in this country.

Tags: books

« Older entries · Newer entries »