A hipster cartoon with surprising depth
Callbacks to groups of kid detectives, balanced with Lovecraftian terror
If you’re the kind of person for whom the phrase “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids” doesn’t immediately elicit a smile — if not a full-blown flashback to Saturday mornings of cartoons and soggy cereal — you probably won’t see the appeal of the new novel from Edgar Cantero. And that’s really too bad; Meddling Kids, the second English-language novel from the Barcelona-based Cantero, is a popculture gem, a hipster cartoon with depth.
Cantero largely avoids the pitfalls of nostalgia by setting Meddling Kids thirteen years after the kids of the Blyton Summer Detective Club (BSDC) solved their biggest, and final, case, the mystery of Deboen Mansion and the Sleepy Lake Monster. That case saw the gang get headlines, and sent a man to jail for more than a decade, but it also split the group. The BSDC never reformed after that summer, and the human members — Andy, the tomboy, Kerri, the bookworm, Nate, the nerd — have been haunted by the case ever since. One member, Peter, the jock, got famous in Hollywood and died, suddenly, surprisingly, possibly a victim of the long-ago mystery.
So now it’s time for the gang, with Tim, a descendent of their original canine companion, to return to the Zoinx River Valley in Oregon, retrace their steps, and try to figure out, once and for all, what happened that summer. It won’t be easy. Andy is on the run from the law, and Nate, who has spent years in psychiatric care, is currently a resident of an asylum in Arkham, Mass., — yes, that Arkham, the one from H.P. Lovecraft’s cthulhu mythos — with Peter for company. Peter, who has been dead for years.
Meddling Kids is a playfully self-aware novel, stuffed with nods not only to the Scooby Doo gang but Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, the Loser’s Club in Stephen King’s It and other groups of kid detectives, but these are balanced with healthy dollops of Lovecraftian terror and pulp alternative history. The novel also, perhaps surprisingly, takes a hard look at adult relationships between childhood friends.
And, of course, there’s also a haunted mansion, lake creatures, mysterious fogs and footprints, an abandoned mine and, yes, a chase on a mine cart, along with a climactic unmasking, as one would hope. Meddling Kids is a winner; Cantero got away with it just fine. Robert Wiersema’s latest book is Seven Crow Stories.