"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
~Mark Twain, 1898
My taste in literature is eclectic - OK, my taste in books is actually better described as indiscriminate and promiscuous, but eclectic sounds much more cultured - but I do tend to read in themes. One book leads to another, and they incline to be relatives of a sort, sharing a taste, a flavour. Some sunny afternoons find me walking alongside detectives like Marple, Spade, Qwilleran, Millhone... Some evenings I am fighting (or running away from) zombies, werewolves, and other supernatural baddies that share a world with Dresden, Cabal, Yellowrock, Crowe... Of late I've been swimming in a horror motif. It's broad enough to encompass mystery and adventure and fantasy and historical fiction. And that makes me cosmopolitan, yes?
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Seshat, Egyptian goddess
of record-keeping and
measurement by Jeff Dahl.
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I consume rabidly from the shelves of the library, which I feel contributes to the general stability of society and proves I'm an adult. (Seriously, I'm an adult. I am.) While giving me access to more books than I can ever possibly read - this being both a happy and a sad thought - getting books from the library also creates a reading fingerprint of sorts that allows Seshat, with her mystical, magical powers, to provide suggestions of books I might like.
I'll be honest, Seshat is wrong 80% of the time. Mostly she doesn't get me.
But occasionally she'll throw out a book that does peak my interest. With a surfeit of horror titles - and the ineluctable link to the Lovecraft mythos - it was perhaps inevitable that this book should pop up like a giant albino penguin.
Enter Meddling Kids. Seshat got it right. I did enjoy it. A lot.
I'll be honest, Seshat is wrong 80% of the time. Mostly she doesn't get me.
But occasionally she'll throw out a book that does peak my interest. With a surfeit of horror titles - and the ineluctable link to the Lovecraft mythos - it was perhaps inevitable that this book should pop up like a giant albino penguin.
Enter Meddling Kids. Seshat got it right. I did enjoy it. A lot.
Meddling Kids (A Blyton Summer Detective Club Adventure)
by Edgar Cantero
A solid four stars - plus one for sheer wit!
★★★★ + ★
Did you love Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! as a kid? (And do you still love it?) Did your literary journey inevitably lead you to the (sadly opuscular) works of H.P. Lovecraft and the (happily ubiquitary) mythos he created? Did you ever wonder what it would be like if your childhood scoobiphilia and your penchant for lovecraftian horror had an 80s Reese's Peanut Butter Cups "Hey, You Got Peanut Butter in My Chocolate" moment? Well, wonder no more! Cantero took your favourite Saturday morning cartoon sleuths and your beloved, cherished, madness-inducing non-Euclidean geometry and made a tasty treat!
It's not a two-pony show. Peppered in with the million Scooby Doo and Lovecraft references are nods to Enid Blyton (Duh!) and Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and the Goonies and lots of stuff-from-my-childhood things.
"Tim curled up in a corner of the backseat, sheltering his penguin from the storm, all tensed up in 'scandalized Maggie Smith' pose."Or maybe that's a Paul Rudnick reference?
Anyway...
Part mashup, part homage, part lark, Meddling Kids explores how our beloved gang of sleuths (under copyright-infringement-free pseudonyms, of course) made the transition from kid detectives to adults. Turns out it was a rough ride for all of them.
The two boys, two girls, and big dog (Ringing any bells?) of the Blyton Summer Detective Club spent their summers solving zany mysteries in and around Blyton Hills, Oregon. It was a fun and exciting way to spend their vacation together. But their final, laureate case had a profound effect on them and after they unmasked the Sleepy Lake Monster and the media frenzy died away they went their separate ways and lost contact with one another. Thirteen years later, when Thomas X. Wickley, the Sleepy Lake Monster, is released from prison it sets off a series of events that brings each of the surviving gang members back to Blyton Hills. The case, they realise, had never really been solved and each of them was changed in ways that they are only now beginning to recognize.
It's not perfect. Far from it. The writing isn't the best (or maybe not my cup of tea), with run-on sentences finding a far too comfortable home in this novel and Cantero inventing new words when really he shouldn't as (a) there are already perfectly serviceable words in English for what he is trying to communicate and (b) he isn't that great at coming up with the new words. Cantero also seems unsure if he is writing a book or a screen play. The narration shifts from one format to the other and, whether intentional or unintentional, the result is a jarring read through the transitions that completely break you out of any suspension of disbelief.
Even with the sometimes-enervated writing style, this book remains aware that it is a piece of tribute and is, throughout, a very entertaining read if your nostalgia is littered with Scooby snacks and Elder Gods. With both sly and glaring pop culture references, a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, and the bravery to confront child-cum-adult issues (mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, addiction to black magic...) this is a fun and entertaining adventure.
As Cantero states:
"No book is dangerous in and of itself you know, but historically reading a book in the wrong way has lead to terrible consequences."
Ashley Joanna "Ash" Williams knows. And Cantero knows we know.
Again, a solid four stars - with that extra star for Cantero doing something that I really wanted somebody to do but didn't realise I wanted it.
