2023 read #117: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero.

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

324 pages

Published 2017

Read from October 11 to October 13

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

If you had hoped a book with a title and cover like this one would actually be about meddling kids, solving mysteries from their bikes or from a groovy van, the first pages quickly disabuse you of that notion. This is about the traumatized adults those kids grow into, their lives beset with nightmares, drugs, therapists, suicide, and the eldritch horrors lurking behind the men in the rubber masks.

I knew going into it what this would be, but I gotta admit, at this point in my life, I want kids-on-bikes novels more than I want novels of depressed and traumatized adults going back to face what really happened. I’m a depressed and traumatized adult, beset by daily horrors and corruption! If I wanted more of that, I could just be present in my body!

Anyway. The prose isn’t my favorite, affecting a purplish modern pulp cadence that tries way too hard to be cheeky and punchy and cynical, full of pop culture similes and fourth-wall-breaking camera angles. The narrative voice fits neither the gravitas of the eldritch PTSD narrative nor the childhood suspicions buried beneath the meddling-kids hijinks. (Or maybe, at any rate, it just didn’t click for me.) Cantero’s prose most closely reminded me of movie novelizations from mercenary writers in the late 1970s and early ’80s, William Kotzwinkle’s E.T. in particular.

Aside from that, the story is fine. It’s 1990; thirteen years ago, the Blyton Summer Detective Club — four tweens and their faithful Weimaraner Sean — cracked their last case, capturing an old drifter who had dressed up like a lake monster in order to steal hidden treasure from an island on Sleepy Lake. Except that isn’t what happened. The truth has drawn the surviving Summer Detectives (and Sean’s descendant, Tim) back to Sleepy Lake and its half-forgotten horrors. If you’ve seen the cover, or made it through the prologue, you’ll know exactly what awaits them: eldritch business straight out of Lovecraft, complete with the Necronomicon. The book does what it says on the label, no real surprises.

Keep in mind that, the way I use ratings here, 2.5 stars is “pretty good, about average, worth a read,” and not what 2.5 stars would mean on Goodreads.