Name: bellamy-hill's review of Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
Item: Meddling Kids
Rating: 3.5
Author: bellamy-hill

Edgar Cantero

"The summer of 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 ... 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."--Jacket.

Meddling Kids

Ashlee

Four former kid detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in an old haunted house. 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.

A Novel

As an ode to the teenage mystery solver genre, it's perfectly fine. 

You can tell the author has a deep love for the genre, but there's a few creative choices that puzzle. The mixture of writing styles is jarring, and I half expected the screenplay additions to be hints to yet another meta reveal in the case of "we were reading a movie in verisimilitude the WHOLE TIME" a la Scooby Doo Goes Hollywood or Zombie Island 2. It mocks tropes while also puzzling indulging others, and can get a little tonally confusing. It all cancels out to just simply be perfectly fine.

bellamy-hill

As an ode to the teenage mystery solver genre, it's perfectly fine. 

You can tell the author has a deep love for the genre, but there's a few creative choices that puzzle. The mixture of writing styles is jarring, and I half expected the screenplay additions to be hints to yet another meta reveal in the case of "we were reading a movie in verisimilitude the WHOLE TIME" a la Scooby Doo Goes Hollywood or Zombie Island 2. It mocks tropes while also puzzling indulging others, and can get a little tonally confusing. It all cancels out to just simply be perfectly fine.

Colton Ray

The concept behind this was great. Imagine a grown-up version of the Scooby Doo gang returning to their hometown to defeat a true monster with its own evil mansion and underground demon army. I was an enormous Scooby Doo fan in childhood (watched all the episodes, had the toys, lunchbox, t-shirt as well) but I just couldn't get into the writing for this one. Perhaps this is because English is not this author's first language, but I constantly found myself skimming over sloppily-written sections, including multiple sections written in screenplay dialogue - a needless and distracting gimmick that didn't exactly work. The dialogue was good, but almost a little too snappy and witty, like in a romantic comedy where everyone is too clever for their own good. Either way, it's still good enough that I would recommend for pulpy horror fans and those that would like a more adult take on the Mystery Gang without resorting to fanfiction.

Kaylee Ray

This has very easily become one of my new favorite novels. I loved the author’s writing style and humor. Each character was amazing and fucked up in their own way. Every time I thought I had it figured out something even crazier happened, right up until the last sentence.

Zugzug

This for my taste was a cozy Mystery, Lovecraft inspired, adventure romp with plenty of action thrown in. A few decent twists by the end. I have seen a variety of reviews and understand not for everyone but if Scooby Doo gang with darker elements thrown in sounds at all interesting I would suggest giving it a try.

While I enjoyed the premise and the general plot of this novel, it was extremely difficult to take it seriously. Sections of it are randomly written in screenplay format (there was no particular framing device I could discern) and it is full of phrases like "she capslocked". I am sure the author thought it was funny but it is that Elon Musk type of humour which should have died with the internet he killed; it comes of as try-hard above anything else.

The Scooby Doo meets Elder Gods idea should work. It doesn't really here. The characters were very base level on motives and the "twist" at the end can be seen from the second chapter. 

Hyde F

Taous Merakchi

Je veux lire des livres comme ça tous les jours. Un peu moins lovecraftiens si possible parce que c'est pas tellement ma came à la base, mais pour le reste c'est 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, in the vein of It and Stranger Things A nostalgic celebration of horror, friendship and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn. In 1977 the Blyton Summer Detective Club unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster—another low-life fortune hunter who would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids. By 1990 the former detectives are haunted by strange, half-remembered events that cannot be explained by a guy in a mask. Andy, the once-intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, wants answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the former kid genius 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. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their leader... which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years. The time has come to get the team back together and find out what actually happened all those years ago. It’s their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

C. J. Daley 

My fiancé has always been huge into Scooby-Doo, so I had ordered this for her and she really liked it. This Spooky Season I decided to give it a listen instead of a read, and it was a good one. 

For all intents and purposes, this is an adult Scooby-Doo reimagining. There’s some great Easter eggs, references, and alterations. But I particularly liked that the author changed the characterizations of the meddling kids. Although I did find some of it, like the romance aspect, to feel incredibly forced and weird. Still enjoyed the overall changes though. 

13 years after the final case for the Blyton Summer Detective Club, Andy decides it’s time to figure out what went wrong and get the band back together. They are all messed up, and at first I just thought it was going to be a dark story about their combined ptsd, but the story really deviated in at least a somewhat satisfying way. What if they weren’t just meddling kids? What if not every crime had a guy in a mask at the end of it? That’s what this story seeks to show. 

My only real gripe for this one is that the climax builds and builds and builds, and then I personally felt like it fell flat. It actually comes to a close so suddenly that I thought I missed it and re-listened to a full half an hour…I hadn’t missed it, it’s just in actuality, not really there anyway. Regardless though I did really enjoy the rest of the stuff that goes us there. 

Personally a 3.5/5* for me, I wish there had been Scooby snacks…

The ending felt both rushed and long winded at the same time, also bizarre twist. I did enjoy it though!

Vicky

Molly Morgan

The way this book was written made it very hard to read. The plot and premise was interesting and kept me reading, but dear god was it tough to get through.

Kirsten Simkiss

what did i just read

No, seriously, what was that? Did that make sense to any of you? Because that came out of nowhere for me. I don't want to post spoilers, but the ending? Really???

I feel like this book just wanted to be adult Stranger Things at times and Alan Wake at others. It never seemed to solidify for me as something all it's own, which was sort of sad. I desperately wanted to like this book, partially because the idea of it sounded really interesting to me and partly because I really liked the cover design, but I just couldn't bring myself to like it once the ball really started rolling.

All of my complaints about the book are very much plot related and therefore I'm not going to talk about them here, but there were *many* things that just absolutely derailed me in the second half of the book. These moments completely brought me out of the book to vent my frustrations at the lack of logic. I physically had to will myself to finish this book because I'll be damned if I didn't give it my best.

I will say that there are LGBT+ characters and discussion of mental health, though I don't feel that the mental health portions were handled particularly well. There's also some appropriation of native culture as well as a smidge of transphobia. There is only the barest amount of racial diversity, with one main character being Latina and one side character being Native American.

As much as I'd like to recommend this book to others because of how pretty the dang cover is, I cannot find one thing in this book that I absolutely loved and therefore I cannot recommend it to you as a reader. I also must state that this book is absolutely geared toward adults and not children.

Tara Ward

The book is a fun throwback to my favorite cartoon (Scooby Doo) and genres (Mystery and Horror), so of course I loved it. Yes, it reads like a novelization of a movie. Yes, the switching to screenplay dialog and scene directions can be annoying, but the plot, characterization, and imagination make it worth finishing. It did seem like the author relied a bit too much on a thesaurus and even made up his own words at times, but overall I really enjoyed the novel and cheered on the characters. It's not a literary classic, but it's a fun read.

Gretchen Sartele

This book was absolutely nothing like what I expected and struggled with the first half of the book, but the ending was worth pushing through.

Dee B. 

Maggie Gordon

I really wanted to like this take on kid detectives grow up and meet Lovecraft, but I think Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated did it better. Well, not the adult part since it was a show about teens, but basically everything else. Admittedly, SD:MI was awesome and hard to beat, but Meddling Kids just didn't offer much new. The action scenes were great, but the prose choices of Cantero were often disruptive to the reading experience (why all the weird dialogue shifts?!?). The villain was pretty lackluster, and I didn't end up really caring about any of the characters. Alas, another read that just didn't wow me in 2017.

Ethan Hill

What would you get if you took the settling from Zombie Island and mixed it with the mystery/villain of The Witches Ghost? This! A tedious, perplexing, and all around uninspired read that offered me next to no enjoyment and that I hope to forget as soon as possible.

While I really liked it, I have to say this book is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. It is a lot more dark than you would probably expect given that it's inspired by Scooby Doo gang.
But if you are a fan of mysteries and horror I think you would like it.

Andy Bayliss

This book would have received 5 stars had I read it physically rather than via audiobook. I love mystery and anything Scooby doo related or similar which makes this my cup of tea. Hope I can reread this in physical form in the future ❤️

Haley Quinton

Nothing profound here, but a fun read. 

It was pretty gimmicky at times (made up words, overly cutesy writing), but it was a good October read. Tim (the dog) was my favorite character.

Emily

I would say this is more like 2.5 stars.

I'm going to put the rest in spoilers, but all in all I will say I was disappointed in the characterization, lackluster plot, and overall feeling like it could have been handled a lot better with a few tweaks.

(view spoiler)[
First of all, I don't appreciate the suggested reading from the necronomicon. I'm assuming these weren't actually from the book, but I don't trifle with otherworldly things like that and would have at least appreciated a heads up or disclaimer of some sort. There's nothing like listening to the audio book happily, then having to fumble around to skip ahead 30 seconds to pass over a supposed spell.

I did not appreciate that Carrie told Andy she wasn't a lesbian from the get-go, but somehow morphed into one. That's not really how sexuality works, and I'm tired of the stereotype being perpetuated in literature. It also seemed at times like Hate was hinted at having feelings for his cousin, which is odd.

Andy's character is frustrating because it's like her criminal record is meaningless. She broke out of prison with no repercussions and then an insane asylum with similar results. Really? It just makes you suspend disbelief to the point that when it's mentioned at the end, you wonder, 'Why bother mentioning it?'

There's so much I could tear apart with this, that I don't really want to go much farther. If you haven't read this yet, at least you'll have an idea of what you'll be diving into when you open it.
 (hide spoiler)]

Loredana

This dark version of Scooby Doo follows four kids and a dog during their summers they spend in a small town resolving cases. until their last one which seems to wreck all of them.
Years later as one of them is dead they decide to come back and find the truth behind all of it.

I enjoyed this book, I liked the vibe and the plot of something deeper hiding behind all this. but this book seemed like it never ended, and I think it comes from the fact that there is no chapter because I was not bored reading it but it felt like I was not moving forward in it. The characters were great with different ways to cope with the trauma, they have their own personality that gives something to the story. It is really mysterious with different aspects of it and plot twists.
The last thing that bothered me was the writing of dialogues that changes from time to time without a reason.

Ashlee &
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

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Ashlee &Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

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Ashlee &
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero