Week 43 Review: Meddling Kids

From Goodreads:

With raucous humor and brilliantly orchestrated mayhem, Meddling Kids subverts teen detective archetypes like the Hardy Boys, the Famous Five, and Scooby-Doo, and delivers an exuberant and wickedly entertaining celebration of horror, love, friendship, and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn.

SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon's Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster—another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.

1990. The former detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in the old haunted house. There are too many strange, half-remembered encounters and events that cannot be dismissed or explained away by a guy in a mask. And Andy, the once intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, is tired of running from her demons. She needs answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the one-time kid genius and budding biologist, now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their team leader . . . which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.

The time has come to get the team back together, face their fears, and find out what actually happened all those years ago at Sleepy Lake. It's their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids is a strikingly original and dazzling reminder of the fun and adventure we can discover at the heart of our favorite stories, no matter how old we get.

My Review:
This book was a lot of fun to read! I really enjoy Scooby-Doo, it was a great part of my childhood. And this takes the same premise, a group of kids who investigate various goings on in this town, but they've disbanded, and it's years later and they're coming back together. Kinda like the 2002 Scooby-Doo movie.

The way this was written was so hilarious! I loved the humor, and the references, and the pop culture. It was so easy to read this book, even though there was some meanings that were layered that were a little hard to grasp sometimes.

This is the story of the group now when they're adults, where life hasn't always treated them kindly, who look back at the time when they solved these mysteries with fondness. Besides the last case, there was something fishy about how that all played out.

I really enjoyed watching the band get back together (with a canine descendant of the original canine member) as they learn more about this case. The synopsis mentions Lovecraft, which while I've never read, I known the geist from mentions in the collective culture. It was dark and spooky and I enjoyed it so much! 

I had a really great time reading this book, it was really entertaining! 

Author: Edgar Cantero
Read: October 22nd, 2022
Source: Ebook.bike
Reason Why: Sounded really good, and it's a Historical Fiction 2022 Book and a SAC 2022 Book!
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: July 11th 2017

5/5 Hearts

5/5 Books

5/5 Stars