Blaine's Reviews > Meddling Kids

The night was cold but gentle like an X-rated metaphor.
…
The radio played “Groove Is in the Heart,” which is a radio’s way of saying it couldn’t care less about the mood of a scene.

I received an ARC of Meddling Kids via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. If you were raised (correctly, I might add) on Scooby Doo cartoons, this book is likely for you. It tells the story that comes after those cartoons are over. The kids are grown (except the one who committed suicide), they’re all troubled (again, except the dead one), and they have realized that one of the ‘innocent’ crimes they thought they solved as kids is not only unsolved, but has left them damaged.

Once they make the decision to go back and solve the case for real, the story is a clever update on the same beats the cartoons hit: helpful adults, unhelpful adults, secret villains, mines and tunnels, scientific explanations for unusual phenomena, etc. There are parts straight out of Lovecraft, and this book could have been a horror novel if the author had wished it so. Instead, the horror is always tempered by a steady stream of sarcasm and laughs.

My only knock on Meddling Kids is the writing itself. I found myself distracted by the constant switching from prose to stage dialogue, and by the very self-aware writing in places, such as “ending its overall contribution to the story in one paragraph,” and “[t]wo blank lines later, they were still sitting there.” Still, overall this is a highly entertaining story and a very enjoyable read. Recommended.