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.