Join us for an evening with Edgar Cantero on his new book, Meddling Kids – a “dark, twisted, grown-up take on Scooby Doo and the Gang.” With raucous humor and brilliantly orchestrated mayhem, Meddling Kids subverts teen detective archetypes like the Hardy Boys, the Famous Five, and Scooby-Doo, and delivers an exuberant and wickedly entertaining celebration of horror, love, friendship, and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn.
SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon’s Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster—another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.
1990. The former detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in the old haunted house. There are too many strange, half-remembered encounters and events that cannot be dismissed or explained away by a guy in a mask. And Andy, the once intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, is tired of running from her demons. She needs answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the one-time kid genius and budding biologist, now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their team leader . . . which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.
The time has come to get the team back together, face their fears, and find out what actually happened all those years ago at Sleepy Lake. It’s their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.
A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids is a strikingly original and dazzling reminder of the fun and adventure we can discover at the heart of our favorite stories, no matter how old we get.
“Meddling Kids is that rarest of things: a brilliant idea wedded to beautiful and perfectly-pitched execution — this juxtaposition of primary-colored cartoon nostalgia with some seriously dark trauma-survivor subtext that hits you like icy water every time you start having too much fun; jagged reminders of what it must’ve been like to be an actual child trapped in a dungeon with the monsters outside scratching to get in, and of the psychic price paid by those who battle monsters. Even when they walk away alive.”
—NPR.org
“Cantero (The Supernatural Enhancements) will win readers’ hearts with this goofy, smart love letter to childhood adventure and enduring friendship … The prose is fast and funny, and the quirky, lovable characters are absolutely irresistible.”
—Publishers Weekly
EDGAR CANTERO is a writer and cartoonist from Barcelona who works in Catalan, Spanish, and English. He is the author of The Supernatural Enhancements.