If you are my age (which is Millennial, to be clear) you had Enid Blyton forced upon you from the start. Childhood was basically an exercise in levelling-up on Enid Blyton books. You started with Noddy, then moved on to The Wishing Chair and The Faraway Tree, before you entered your 'boarding school era' with Malory Towers and The Naughtiest Girl in School.
Then came either The Famous Five or The Secret Seven, at which point you had to choose whether you were a Five Fan or a Seven Stan. For some reason no one was ever both.
(Side note, Enid Blyton was a terrible person in many ways so I'm not going to over-romanticise her. She was a person with prejudiced opinions who wrote decent-but-twee books that aged really badly. The End.)
I was a Famous Five girl, mainly because the BBC made a series for children's television at around the same time. Even if you haven't read them, you know the trope - two boys, a useless girl, a tomboy, and a dog. They solve mysteries and have fish-paste sandwich picnics with lashings of ginger beer.
It surprised me, then, that Meddling Kids took far more inspiration from The Famous Five than Scooby Doo. There's plenty of Scooby Doo here, but the author seems to sense that to make this too cartoony would be a mistake. Also he's probably less likely to be sued.
Edgar Cantero's Meddling Kids is the story of the four kids (and one dog) who solved crime while on holiday in an idyllic lake town. They were the Blyton Summer Detection Club. Or at least, they were, back in the late 70s. Now it's the 1990 and three of those kids are in their twenties. Two (the 'Fred' character and 'Timmy the Dog') are dead, from suicide and old age respectively. The Tomboy (Andy) believes that their final mystery ruined their lives in some incalculable way and wants the club to go back and finish what they started.
The other two members aren't doing any better, Kerri, who fulfils a little of the 'Daphne' role and a lot of the 'Velma' one, is struggling with nightmares and a general lack of direction. Her science career has gone nowhere, and she lives alone with her dog (grandson of the original, and the best character in the book). The bookish boy (Nate) is in a mental hospital, because he sees things.
Namely, he sees their dead friend. All the time.
What follows sees the group return to Blyton Cove (see?!) only to find it smaller than they remembered, no longer an idyllic vacation spot but a jobless, polluted dive. Even their old enemies aren't the same; the grownups who tried to stop their adventuring now seem quite reasonable, the old bully is just some guy, and the creepy 'witch' is just a widow who writes erotica. Nothing is black and white anymore, and nothing is as easy as tearing off a mask.
I won't go into spoilers, but there are some great set-pieces here. The book is filmic in style, and playful with its storytelling. The monster scenes are genuinely scary and the adventure just keeps getting grander in scale. With the forced retro vibe and tentacled horrors, it will appeal to the Stranger Things fans too (as the logo unsubtly hints).
However, the book slows itself down a fair amount with constant planning and debate over what to do in between those moments. A number of times I whispered 'come ON' as I read. It makes sense to talk that way as real adults, but it dragged the book down in places. I also think that Nate and his visions were side-lined throughout. Ghostly Peter complains throughout that they don't have a proper leader without him to take charge, and I started to agree.
The big surprise, though, was the romance. From the very beginning we learn that Andy is desperately in love with Kerri and has been from their pre-teen years. Andy being a butch lesbian surprises no one, so I was immediately on-board with the pairing considering... well... Kerri is the Velma of the piece. It's teased, gently at first, and then less gently, At one point, I flipped to the end to make sure this wasn't the worst instance of queerbaiting I'd ever experienced. But my fears were unfounded.
In the end, it works out for the Blyton Summer Detective Club, even if it doesn't wrap itself up in a neat little bow. It doesn't need to - welcome to adulthood, kids. Zoinks!
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