Meddling Kids

There seem to be two main camps on Meddling Kids: Those who find this satirical Scooby Doo/Cthulu mash-up deeply profound and those who found it twee, slow paced and with annoying characters.

I was neither – I thought the characters were likable enough and the action was well-paced. I didn't mind the portmanteaus or the spontaneous shifts into stage directions. If anything, I thought that these really highlighted the surrealist mix that Meddling Kids was trying to be and wished that this was a more frequent choice, rather than an occasional slip. Which kind of sums up how I felt about this book overall: I wanted it turned up to eleven. I really wanted Cantero to be fully satirical, referential and really stretch what these extreme genres could do and instead I mostly got Lovecraft, especially by the end of the book. There was a lot of Cthuluoid monsters and survival horror and not much of the Teen Sleuth conceits.

I think that there is something really cool there: as kids, we're scared of everything that goes bump in the night. Teenage skepticism shows that it is all just a Man in a Mask, but maturity shows that there are deeper, more existential horrors than what we'd even previously conceived. But those ideas aren't really explored.

This was so much fun. Take the classic Scooby-Doo cartoon characters, scramble them up a bit and morph them into real-life people (and dog), suppose that they have to confront one case where it's NOT a guy in a mask, but unnameable evil they must fight, and tell that story in a totally self-referential way - this gem is what you will get.

Cantero clearly knows and loves the English language, and thereby earns the right to color outside the lines. (He won me over early, when he correctly used the word “lectern.”) Casual neologisms get cozy with OED chestnuts. Descriptions get downright fanciful, with anthropomorphized hair and chapter intros like “She flung the door open to clamorous nonreaction, silhouetted down to a bulky jacket and a baseball cap, the blue wind blowing away the title card.” During a tense dialog, a portentous question doesn't merely hang in the air, but “levitates” over the diner table. The playful use of language is worth the price of admission all by itself.

But of course the main attraction is the metafictional take on a Saturday-morning cartoon. This is very self-consciously a work about other works, peeking through the fourth wall at you with sudden stage directions or script-style dialog, then inexplicably flowing back into standard third-person narration. Meta silliness would make me laugh out loud, but I got some shivers too. This book will broadly wink at you one moment, then the next moment the winking eye deliquesces into something unspeakable staring from a dead socket.

At times I'd say to myself, “It doesn't make sense for them to do that,” or “This sequence seems a little too goofy,” only to realize that Cantero managed to evoke these reactions as a way to make the reader reflect back on the source material. To be honest, I think he uses this trick to paper over a few weak spots, but it was still fun.

Said weak spots: the pacing is a little off for me (it probably could have been shortened to good effect), and sometimes character motivations are too murky or preposterous to be fully excused by “But that's exactly what the Scooby Gang did!” But these are minor complaints. As a whole, this is both delightful and truly original (by way of putting together lots of familiar elements, from Scooby-Doo to Lovecraft to IT, in a wholly distinctive way).

I'll end by noting that I'd love to see this adapted as anime - in talented hands the sly tone could be conveyed with visual puns and references rather than textual ones, while the horror elements would really hit home! But if that never happens, I'll be satisfied to read it again.