Meddling Kids Is Much More Than a Metafictional Mashup of Scooby-Doo and Buffy

But Cantero resists the temptation to rest on his meta premise. Rather than crafting a simply entertaining, cliché-skewering horror comedy, Cantero focuses on the inner turmoil of his heroes—the reasons why they’re so desperate to solve their last, biggest case—and gives them a villain who knows all the same tricks, creating a deeper story about three people confronting their pasts while still carting in a Mystery Machine full of quirky humor, fourth-wall breaks, and hordes of murderous fish-people.
The Blyton Hills Summer Detective Club was once the talk of their hometow:  a group of preteen sleuths who spent every school break busting sheep smuggling rings and pirate jewelry thieves. But in the summer of 1977, they take on the case that will haunt them the rest of their lives: that of the Sleepy Lake Monster. While they catch the culprit (yet another man in a costume, searching for hidden treasure and scaring away his competitors), they are unable to forget the horrifying things they saw in the dilapidated mansion at the center of Sleepy Lake. Thirteen years later, Andy, the group tomboy, still has unanswered questions and regrets from that night, and breaks out of jail to reopen the case. To do it, she’ll need the help of former child genius Kerri, who spends her nights tending bar, drinking the nightmares away, and taking care of Tim, the grandson of the club’s original dog sidekick. She’ll also need Nate, the occult nerd who checked himself into an asylum, and Peter, the group’s former leader, who died in Hollywood only to end up haunting his childhood friend. Together, they’ll return to their former hometown to end the nightmares—and maybe crack the case once and for all.
Meddling Kids isn’t really about the mystery (though it’s a good one), but the characters investigating it. It’s many ways a story about closure, about growing into maturity and making peace with the past, from the central mystery that haunts (sometimes literally) the Blyton Hills Detective Club for over a decade, to the ways they all grew apart, to being forced to confront the bullies of their childhoods as adults. Nate, Andy, and Kerri reminisce about their glory days while hanging around their former base of operations—Nate conversing with the literal ghost of his past—or simply driving the lonely road to Blyton Hills, catching each other up on their lives. These characters may be running through a plot that sounds like a parody, but they are anything by caricatures. When they finally do get closure, it means almost as much (if not more) than solving the mystery.

Rather than left his pop culture-attuned leads off easy, Cantero crafts a capable, genre-savvy villain. The shadowy force residing at the center of Sleepy Lake knows enough about horror stories to weaponize the trio’s expectations and present them with a real challenge. By the time the final confrontation occurs, and the entire evil plan surrounding Blyton Hills and the Sleepy Lake Monster is fully revealed, they’re on a level playing field— a twisted, calculating villain and three relatively competent heroes engaged in snark-to-snark combat to the death amongst a herd of fishpeople.
Plenty of novels play the self-aware heroes game, and plenty more break the fourth wall, but few do so as gleefully or as compellingly. It’s a sincere character story dressed up in an ironic rubber mask, and it totally gets away with it, never mind the meddling kids.
Meddling Kids is available now.