Cthulhu-ulhu-Doo!

I picked up Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids with some trepidation; despite being one of the semi-finalists for goodreads.com's Horror Novel of the year, the Scooby-Doo set up never mixes well with the real supernatural. (Except maybe The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo. Despite what others will tell you, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island was terrible. I never figured out why.) While the original shows flirted with the supernatural as thematic elements, it was almost always a person in a rubber mask with nothing better to do that bother teenagers.

Case in point: Milissa Wilcox here is a gal in a rubber mask, but her grave marker bears the alchemical symbol of Leviathan.

Any rate, this isn't exactly Scooby-Doo. The characters aren't complete cyphers, although some overlap is obviously there. So, shell we meet Blyton Summer Detective Club, who some 13 years before the start of the story solved the Sleepy Lake Monster Mystery at the old Deboën mansion, using a trap that sent a man in a rubber mask flying down a flight of stairs on a rolling cart into a fishing net. Mind you, the kids are all 11 and 12 years old and have a Weimaraner. We have the ostensible leader of the gang, Peter, who went on to be an actor, but who killed himself in Hollywood with pills and vodka. Except his ghost (or a delusion of one) hangs out with Nate, a geek who self committed himself to Arkham Asylum in Massachusetts. Nate's cousin, Kerri had reddish orange curls and was on her way to becoming a biologist, but now she's a drunk working in various bar waitressing positions. Kerri is raising Tim , the great grandson of of the original Weimaraner. Rounding out the group, we have Andy, the tomboy who's both a criminal and military drop out.

At the start, Andy confronts the man in the rubber mask after his parole hearing. After getting answers she doesn't like, she sets off to reunite the gang to go back to Blyton, Oregon, and confront what they missed as tweenagers. This of course means breaking Nate out of Arkham using a straitjacket, an office chair, and a dog... and the budding one sided lesbian desires of Andy towards Kerri.

Any rate, after a bunch of argument, they wind up back in Blyton, a town on the Zoinx river. We find that the town bully is now a waiter at the diner as well as a deputy sheriff. The deputy they hated as kids is now Sheriff and a member of the Walla Walla tribe who knows the legends of the god beneath the mountain with an 18gazillion consonant name. 

What follows is a mix of zany adventure, with the supernatural being proven real, but the force behind it being someone with a mask of sorts on.

It works much better than I would have expected. I think the real reason it works better than Scooby's adventures in real supernatural stuff is that it allows the characters to actually grow up, not become adult cyphers of their teenage selves. Mind you, it's quite a bit like reading Scooby-Doo vs Pennywise the Dancing Clown in places, but I couldn't help but laugh at the idea of Shaggy reading aloud from the Necronomicon.

Really, it's a damn good read for those who don't mind childhood growing up and facing down the real monsters.