Meddling Kids
by Edgar Cantero
Knopf Doubleday, 2017
336 Pages
Young Adult
Meddling Kids is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in years! The story captures the essence of a Scooby-Doo episode for teen readers in a scenario that is steeped in the fantastic occult lore of a Lovecraftian exercise in monstrosity. Filled with self-aware humor derived from pop culture references and the teen mystery solving motif (like Hanna-Barbera’s 14th episode of Mystery Incorporated, “Mystery Solvers Club State Finals,”) this book references everything from the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew to Trixie Belden. Though there is no direct mention of the iconic cartoon characters, there are homages like the Zoinks! river in Oregon, and a town named after The Famous Five’s Enid Blyton.
Five kids who had once comprised the Blyton Hills Summer Detective Club return to Sleepy Lake in 1990 to face the unresolved pieces of an old case they believe is responsible for their adult psychological issues.
Nate Rogers – Like Shaggy, a regular-type dude. A guy who grooves on the occult, and may have made a mistake as a teen by reading some forbidden passages aloud.
Kerri Hollis – A gorgeous red-headed woman who is also the brains of the operation, and a university-trained biologist.
Andrea Rodriguez – She likes to be called Andy. Martial-arts expert. (She has a crush on Kerri. Well, who wouldn’t with that extravagant red hair?)
Peter Manner – a good-looking actor who took his own life, despondent after the soul-tearing horror he saw at the bottom of the lake. But his ghost is Nate’s companion, loyal to the BSDC to the last.
Tim – Kerri’s dog, a weimaraner, and no, he doesn’t talk. Well, not mostly. Believed to be the son of Roger, who is the son of George, son of Sean, the dog who was with the Club when they captured Wickley at the beginning of it all.
Back in ’77, five kids in a strangely formulaic mystery solving club captured a criminal pretending to be a lake monster in order to scare people away from the treasure he believed to be buried in Deboën Mansion. But the real mystery was never solved. The things that they saw stayed with each of the kids into their teens and adulthood, nagging at their psyche, a far cry from a man in a rubber suit.
Andy has taken the initiative to get the band back together and head back to Blyton Hills. First she gets Kerri (after the obligatory woman kicking ass in a bar scene,) then they head to the mental ward where Nate has yet again committed himself …and break him out. Tim gets a penguin chew toy and seems happy to be on an adventure.
Mountains to climb, and creeks to cross, and treasures in every spot. Swamps where you can build rafts, and caves to take shelter in when it rains, and old mills and barns where hand-wringing bad guys think of their evil plots, and lakes with monsters, and haunted houses where pirates used to live.
The story doesn’t take itself too seriously, but manages just enough balance between camp and a real mystery to keep you turning the pages as you uncover what’s really going on in Blyton Hills. Among ancient native legends and a Lovecraftian god asleep at the bottom of an incredibly deep lake, creepy anonymous letters prod the four (and their little dog, too,) on to the next step. Like a text adventure computer game, they are led from The Lake, to The Witch, to The Haunted Mansion… where real faceless monsters attack!
Cantero teases us with the old Deboën Mansion on a small islet on Sleepy Lake as the kids interview Dunia, Daniel Deboën’s daughter and town witch, (not to mention author of steamy paranormal romance novels…) and while the gang explores the tunnels of an abandoned gold mine, reads aloud spells from ancient grimoires, and are accosted by “wheezers”: multi-elbowed lake creatures that breathe carbon dioxide and disintegrate in air once killed. The monsters are likely responsible for the necromancer Deboën’s death in 1949… But is he really dead?
The mansion originally belonged to an occultist and gold mine owner, Damian Deboën, then the fortune was inherited by Daniel, his “son”. Mr. Wickley, the man the Mystery Solvers Club captured, was a dope in a rubber suit, but Deboën was a legitimate sorcerer. Nate remembers reading something aloud back in 1977, some passage from an occult library’s grimoire, left open to a specific page… Like a trap. The gang eventually come to believe that they were played by Deboën, used to raise his avatar, acting as a power source themselves. Their “measure” was used as a signature, an unwitting acquiescence to becoming a channel for his evil, and now they’ve been lured back in to the pentagram again.
“He talked to them,” Dunia said, her voice almost unhinged. “He kept urns of human ashes, stuff I don’t know how he obtained, and at night I heard him chanting his spells, words in dead languages whose mere sounds made my skin crawl, and then I listened to him talking. And I was on the floor below, terrified, because whatever went bump in my room could not be worse than what was happening above me, what my father was talking to, what my father was –shouting– at. What I sometimes heard replying. What I heard replying –in fear-.”
Amidst a tense and unputdownable chase through the abandoned gold mine tunnels below the mansion, the kids discover the source of their troubles. Their depression, the jail time, the suicide, the nightmares. All because Deboën possessed them and left his mark within each of them. And he wants the pieces of his soul back.
Fast-forward through some more-than-worthy monster fight scenes with shotguns, pirate swords, and pickaxes among the catacombs of a necropolis riddled with hidden gold… (don’t worry, the dog, scarred and bloodied, makes it to the end,) and we are met with a resolution that satisfyingly twists our expectations of who is truly responsible as we gather the full story at the climatic, villainous, end reveal! Mwah-ha-hah!
If you think those meddling kids and their dog will save the town before the Elder God arises… not in this book.
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