Meddling Kids.
Titan Books. 2018
Scooby-Doo meets The Famous Five meets Cthulhu.
As teens, the Blyton Summer Detective Club had adventures tracking down puzzles and unmasking the bad guys. Their final case was discovering who was behind the Sleepy Lake Monster. Since then, they’ve grown up, and grown apart, and fallen apart: one in jail; one an alcoholic drinking away the nightmares; one in an asylum; one dead. Did they really solve their last case, or was there more to it, that has caused their individual problems? The gang reassembles (yes, even the dead member) to put the past to rest permanently.
This could have been played purely for laughs, but, although there are some humorous moments, chasing down eldritch lake monsters is a serious business, with serious consequences. The serious parts, and the parts subverting various tropes, work much better than the attempts at (slapstick) humour, so it’s just as well they are in the majority.
The presence of the gang’s ghostly leader (even though he might be only in Nate’s head?), plus the current traumatised state of the gang, suggests early on that this isn’t going to be resolved by ripping off yet another costume from yet another con artist. So the main things to puzzle out are the identity of the bad guy, and how to save the world from total annihilation.
This starts off a bit slow, with the gang reassembling, but then crackles along. I enjoyed the trope subversion, in particular the way certain stock characters from the gang’s past had also grown up and changed. And also the way some at-the-time implausibilities are later shown to be plot-relevant. A fun reimagining.
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