Edgar Cantero, you had me at the title of “Meddling Kids.”
Fans will recognize those words as the phrase uttered by a captured villain at the end of a “Scooby-Doo” cartoon, bitter that four teens and their dog have upended a scheme that could have netted millions.
In original-recipe Scooby episodes, villains pose as scary supernatural monsters, but after a few mine-cart chases and snacks, the Scooby gang unmasks them as ordinary greedy humans.
Cantero’s novel, which can be considered either humor-laced horror or horror-laced humor, turns this formula inside out. In “Meddling Kids,” the former amateur child detectives return as troubled young adults to the spooky place where they once put a small-time crook away to confront the real supernatural evil embedded there. As the publicity pitch accurately puts it, it’s Scooby-Doo meets H.P. Lovecraft. Cantero does justice to both sides of that equation.
He fiddles with the cast enough to keep intellectual property lawyers calm. In their mystery-solving heyday, the Blyton Summer Detective Club kids were 13 and 12, younger than the canonical Scooby gang. Thirteen years later, they’re a damaged crew. Kerri, the Daphne cognate and also a smart scientist, is tending bar. In the Velma slot, Andy (Andrea) is a ferocious streetfighter hiding a burning passion for her gorgeous orange-haired friend. The Shaggyesque Nate resides in the Arkham Asylum (one of many nods to Lovecraft’s fiction).
Peter, this novel’s Fred counterpart, killed himself with sleeping pills. But that doesn’t stop him from appearing and speaking to Nate almost nonstop, leaving it for readers to decide if he’s a ghost or Nate’s projected delusion.
Their dog, a Weimaraner named Tim, is the son of their former canine partner.
Andy forces the other surviving members to acknowledge a painful truth: Something scarred them back at Sleepy Lake and the Deboen Mansion, and they will know no rest until they face it. With help from an old ally, they retrace their steps of 13 years ago, learning how deeply the tentacles of the past still gripped them.
While the plot is richly convoluted enough, this is a novel to read for style and for Cantero’s clever allusions to other stories and media. Naturally, Scooby shout-outs abound. The nearby river is named the Zoinx. There is not only an abandoned mine to crawl through, but also mine carts to ride. Unlike 13 years ago, they resolve never to split up, a resolution that events constantly challenge.
Cantero leaves a trail of verbal Scooby snacks for fans of pop-culture humor and storytelling conventions, such as a nod to the “Sir Robin” episode of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Consider this passage in the mine-crawling segment: “From the mining equipment buried in that station like implausible goodies found inside pyramids and hellgates for use of video games characters, Andy picked up a few items she deemed useful.”
He even gives villainous redshirts (to mix my subgenres) their due, sending off one bile-coughing otherworldly critter this way: “It heard the girls crash-landing into the coal pile behind, scrambled to face them, and had its head blown into subatomic matter, thus starting and ending its overall contribution to the story in one paragraph.”
Surprisingly, he also works a fair amount of science into the story, contrasting Kerri’s biochemical orientation to Nate’s occult preoccupation. Hypercapnia (elevated CO2 levels in the bloodstream) has probably never been as vividly dramatized as Cantero does here.
This is not a novel for kids, unless the kids are mature and genre-savvy enough not to be frightened by the story’s use of the Necronomicon, a book of spells to summon some bad angry monsters. But for anyone who finds the triangle formed by Scooby-Doo, Lovecraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer a cozy place to be, here’s your beach book. For all its subversive humor, “Meddling Kids” still honors the Scooby formula: plucky kids way over their heads do get to the bottom of the mystery.
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