Meddling Kids is an adult homage to Scooby-Doo. Imagine Velma is a lesbian with a crush on Daphne and likes to beat up people; Daphne may or may not reciprocate Velma’s feelings and self medicates with alcohol; Fred is dead; Shaggy is in a mental institution and is either seeing his friend’s ghost or a hallucination; and Scooby-Doo is more of a Scrappy-Doo. In Meddling Kids, the four preteens, Andy, Kerri, Peter and Nate, and dog that solve mysteries call themselves the “Blyton Summer Detective Club”. In 1977, they solved their greatest, and last, mystery of the haunted Deboën Mansion and the “Sleepy Lake Creature”, which turned out to be a guy in an amphibian costume who was looking for gold supposedly hidden in the mansion.

The novel opens in 1990, when the members of the Blyton Summer Detective Club are in their mid-twenties and failing spectacularly in life. The guy they unmasked in 1977 has just been released from jail, and Andy tracks him down to confirm what she long suspected, that he was not the one behind the Deboën Mansion haunting. Andy reunites with Kerri and Nate (Peter overdosed on drugs a couple of years earlier) and convinces them to reform the Blyton Summer Detective Club, with a new dog, to find out who is really behind the events of their last summer in Blyton in 1977. Unlike Scooby-Doo, which always ended with the unmasking of a regular person behind the supernatural occurrences, the haunting of Deboën Mansion actually is supernatural and occult in nature.

Meddling Kids got off to a rocky start for me but turned out to be an entertaining read in the end. Edgar Cantero’s writing may not be for everyone. I found Meddling Kids to be too much on the verbose side, especially in terms of how the characters speak. The novel is also campy and at times seems to try too hard to be witty. Cantero likes to mix up his narrative styles; one paragraph reads like a novel and then the next paragraph reads like a script with the actions described in parentheses. I found this very distracting and wish Cantero had left out the script format. I think Meddling Kids might make a better movie or TV series, but I still do not want to read a script. The narrative style switch-up worked better in Cantero’s first novel, The Supernatural Enhancements, which is also a haunted house story but told in epistolary novel format (i.e. journal entries, letters, ciphers, documents). If you like camp and are not bothered by narrative experimentation, then you may enjoy Meddling Kids.