Literature / Meddling Kids (2017)

aka: Meddling Kids

What happens to Scooby Gangs after they grow up?

Meddling Kids is a 2017 novel written by Edgar Cantero. An homage of Kid Detective works such as the The Hardy Boys, The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, The Famous Five and of course, Scooby-Doo, with a helping of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

In 1977, the Blyton Summer Detective Club, or the BSDC, was able to solve the mystery of the Sleepy Lake Monster, who turned out to be another greedy thief who was trying to scare people off so he could find the much rumored treasure of Deboen Mansion. And he would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

Thirteen years later, he's out on parole and is confronted by one of the former members of the BSDC, Andrea "Andy" Rodriguez (a former soldier who was dishonorably discharged and is now a fugitive), who demands to know why he falsely confessed, because she vaguely remembers a few things that don't add up to the official version of that night - and what little she remembers haunts her. Andy then looks for her former teammates, who are also not doing too well: Kerri Hollis, a Teen Genius, got kicked out of grad school and is now a bartender with a drinking problem; Nate, the youngest of the group, is at a mental hospital and is talking with the former leader Peter Manning, who died some time ago. The remaining members decide that they have to return to their old territory of Blyton and figure out what really happened.

Of course, the truth is much stranger, with fish people, a possible immortal pirate and an ancient god...

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Examples

• 20 Minutes into the Past: The book is set in the year 1990, although the Lemony Narrator makes plenty of anachronistic references. The events of the backstory with the Blyton Summer Detective Club's last case took place thirteen years prior in 1977. (This makes the "past" of the setting coincide with the Scooby-Doo franchise's heyday and the "present" coincide with Edgar Cordero's own childhood.)
• Action Girl: Andy and Kerri are more than capable of kicking ass. Andy even goes toe-to-toe with the Big Bad in the climax.
• The Alcoholic: Kerri, who's drowning her sorrows after her life went to hell. She does get better at the end of the book.
• Alien Blood: The wheezers have gooey black blood. In a Show Within a Show example, the "blood" of whargs on the Xira fantasy TV program is said to be made of maple syrup with purple dye in it.
• The Alleged Car: The 1978 Chevy Vega Kammback station wagon in which the trio drive to Oregon. It barely survives the journey, requiring three different repair stops in the first four days just to remain operational.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the end, Joey finds a potential new mystery to solve and Nate finds out who helped them.
• Atrocious Alias: Andy is miffed that the best snappy nickname they can find for the "Sleepy Lake creatures" once they turn out to be real is "wheezers", after the characteristic sound of their breathing.
• Badass Bookworm: Kerri. Her research does provide a lot of clues to help solve the mystery.
• Bait-and-Switch: We get several over the course of the story of who exactly the Big Bad will be, including the very beginning setting up Thomas X. Wickley, the original villain arrested for the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax thirteen years ago, to go after our heroes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge... only to subvert this and show that Wickley got himself the maximum possible sentence on purpose and that he's terrified of meeting any of the meddling kids or getting involved in the Sleepy Lake plot again.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The wheezers, which not only aren't humans but aren't even animals as we understand the term. They apparently thrive on carbon dioxide and are poisoned by oxygen, which is why they've been trapped underground for all of known history (and diverged from most ordinary aboveground life before the Great Oxygenation Event, two billion years ago). They're only as killable as they are in the story because any air that's at all breathable by humans is also rapidly poisoning them — whenever they get a deep gulp of CO2 (from any kind of fire or combustion) they gain a Heroic Second Wind, and if the "limnic eruption" successfully sends a cloud of CO2 spreading out from Sleepy Lake they'll become unstoppable.
• Butch Lesbian: Andy, who's been nursing a hopeless crush on Kerri since childhood. She particularly gets angry if anyone calls her by her full name of Andrea.
• Canon Foreigner: Captain Al Urich isn't clearly an Expy of any specific Famous Five or Scooby-Doo character, and his Intergenerational Friendship with the BSDC seems to be a required consequence of merging these two franchises (the "meddling kids" are all too young to drive and need an adult to take them places and back them up when confronting bad guys).
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Thomas Wickley, and specifically the "Iä fhtagn!" incantation (lifted from The Call of Cthulhu) he shouts when Andy first confronts him.
  • The tooth the gang find buried on the island when they first arrive.
  • The final love letter Peter wrote to Kerri before he died, that she saved.
• Crossover: Nate's fellow asylum inmate, the "schizophrenic hermaphrodite" A.Z. Kimrean, had previously appeared in a Spanish-language short story by Cantero and went on to star in their own mystery novel in 2018, This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us.
  • It soon becomes clear that this story takes place within the Cthulhu Mythos universe, with Arkham and Miskatonic University both existing as real places in Massachusetts (and Arkham containing a well-known mental hospital, in a Shout-Out to Batman), the Necronomicon being a real book, etc.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The BSDC members are pretty heavily messed up (alcoholic, on the run from the law, and in Arkham County Mental Hospital respectively). Once they return to their old town to reopen their last case and are confronted with real monsters the novel flips around to show that whatever life threw at them they're still brave, intelligent, and good-hearted people who are more than capable of fighting off Lovecraftian horrors. The book seems determined to take what Scooby-Doo looks like through a nostalgia filter and turn it into a reality.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: At the end of the book, the kids saved the town and the world, finally got their lives in order and on their way to be happy.
• Eldritch Abomination: The wheezers and their divine patron, the Undergod Thtaggoa.
• Expy: The Blyton Summer Detective Club is clearly one for The Famous Five, hence the Meaningful Name of their Adventure Town being "Blyton Hills". Peter, the eldest one and The Leader, is Julian, his Deadpan Snarker best friend Nate is Dick, hardcore Tomboy Andy (Andrea) is George (Georgina), Kerri is Anne, and their dog is of course based on the Famous Five's Team Pet Timmy. (Their original dog was named Sean, but his present-day descendant is even named Tim.) Kerri and Nate's Aunt Margo and Uncle Emmett are Expies for the Famous Five's Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin.
  • They're also merged with the Scooby-Doo gang as Composite Characters, although since Scooby-Doo is a secondary influence the traits are somewhat mix-and-matched. Peter is the Fred Expy since Fred was originally The Ace and The Leader, with a hint of Fred's later status as The Friend Nobody Likes in more satirical takes on the franchise. Kerri is a Composite Character of Daphne and Velma, with Daphne's beauty, her flaming red hair and her status as The Leader's Love Interest and Velma's status as The Smart Girl. Andy, as the Expy of Tomboy George, is the one without any clear Scooby-Doo analogue, although she's arguably a Decomposite Character because she picks up Velma's Fanon characterization (canonized in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated) as a Butch Lesbian. Present-day Nate has turned into the Shaggy character, being a Nervous Wreck Dirty Coward who's dependent on drugs to function. And we get the final reveal that Tim actually is, like Scooby, a sapient Talking Animal.
  • Canon Foreigner Joey Krantz is a loose Expy of the Scooby Gang's childhood bully Red Herring from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.
  • The wheezers and Thtaggoa are ones for either the Deep Ones and Dagon from H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth or for the Star-Spawn and Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu.
• Fictional Counterpart: In this universe, the show Xena: Warrior Princess has been replaced by the show Xira the Princess Warrior, starring Linda Hamilton rather than Lucy Lawless. Note that this show has apparently run in its entirety and is now in syndication in the year 1990, five years before Xena premiered in Real Life. (The Xira show seems to have taken the place of Hamilton's Real Life stint on Beauty and the Beast (1987).)
  • H. P. Lovecraft, himself, does not seem to exist in this universe — most of the ideas he came up with (which in this universe are based on real occult lore) got written up by other authors, especially his colleague Robert E. Howard.
• For the Evulz: The true Big Bad's motivation. As is traditional for a Cthulhu Mythos story, summoning the Eldritch Abomination and destroying the whole world isn't really in Dunia Deboën's rational self-interest, but she confesses that she's become bored with her immortality and power and wants to end the world for no other reason than her own amusement.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The surviving members of the BSDC, plus newcomer Sixth Ranger Joey Krantz, form one of these:
  • Andy is extremely choleric.
  • Kerri is melancholic, especially in her recurring episodes of clinical depression, although she gets better with Andy's help.
  • Nate is, for the most part, phlegmatic (with his Spirit Advisor hallucination of Peter giving voice to the emotions he can't let himself feel).
  • Peter was apparently the sanguine one among the group when he was alive, and Nate's hallucination of him still acts this way, which makes his being Driven to Suicide that much more shocking to those who didn't know him well. His Suspiciously Similar Substitute, the gang's former bully Joey Krantz, acts much the same (partly because he was never around for any of the BSDC's childhood traumas).
• Gas-Cylinder Rocket: Kerri uses one of the oxygen tanks to propel a mine cart with which the BSDC escape the tunnels.
• Gas Leak Cover-Up: The apocalyptic events of the novel literally are a "gas leak" — a limnic eruption spewing a huge cloud of toxic gas from Sleepy Lake allowing the wheezers and their god to emerge and lay waste to the land while breathing their natural atmosphere — but after Thtaggoa is defeated, everyone accepts that these were hallucinations caused by an explosion at the old RH chemical plant.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Any exposure to the eldritch horror inside the Deboën house will do this to you, with the effect apparently greater the older and more capable of comprehension your mind is. It broke Thomas Wickley's mind to the point he was willing to confess to everything and go to prison just to hide from what he saw; the kids in the BSDC were able to turn their experiences into Repressed Memories but the trauma sent their lives into a tailspin.
• Government Conspiracy: Nate suspects there's one that led to Thomas Wickley getting sentenced so harshly and so quickly after their last case, and one behind the Gas Leak Cover-Up of the present-day events of the novel, but is never able to prove it.
• Gunship Rescue: Captain Al acts as The Cavalry for the BSDC one last time, swooping in in a literal Apache helicopter gunship to blast the Deboën house to ashes with a missile right after our heroes escape... only for this Hope Spot to be interrupted by Thtaggoa himself rising from the waves and crushing the gunship like a bug.
• Imaginary Friend: Nate is followed around by a hallucination of his former best friend Peter, who becomes more visible and active the longer he's been off his antipsychotic medication. Whether he's a genuine Spirit Advisor, the product of evil sorcery infesting Nate's mind with the Big Bad's soul, or just a mundane manifestation of Nate's mental illness is unknown, although most signs point toward the last option. (Peter mostly doesn't do anything but crack jokes or, in moments of stress, freak Nate out by appearing as a horrible rotting corpse, and as Nate points out he doesn't know any of the things the adult Peter would know or act the way adult Peter would act, instead showing up exactly as Nate remembers Peter from childhood.)
  • It's eventually confirmed that this Peter is all in Nate's head and has nothing to do with the real Peter when we discover the real Peter is, in fact, the mysterious cloaked figure engineering the mystery, and of course the Peter in Nate's head knew nothing about this.
• Instant Soprano: Andy's signature Groin Attack in the bar elicits a scream from Alpha so high-pitched and loud that it distracts dogs in a two-mile radius.
• Kid Hero All Grown-Up: Teen Genius Kerri is an alcoholic who can't get into grad school. Tomboy Andy has become a military washout and fugitive from the law. The Baby of the Bunch Nate has checked himself into the Arkham Country Mental Hospital, and former child star and BSDC leader Peter OD'd in young adulthood. It turns out most of this trauma came from repressed memories of encountering real Lovecraftian horrors on their final case together and when it comes time to face them again they're more than capable of shaping up and pulling themselves together.
• Heroic Dog: When the BSDC members are kids, they had Sean, a grown Weimaraner. They now have Tim, Sean's great-grandson.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Yes, very much so, but not without reason. As kids, they would split so to cover more ground and set up traps for the bad guys, and it would work since no one would suspect kids to capture them. As adults, it was very much the same, but also they would be forcibly split up like when being chased by a wheezer.
  • As with Fred on Scooby-Doo, "Let's split up!" was Peter's catchphrase, and Andy makes a point of saying that now that she's The Leader the team will never split up unless forced to.
• Lovecraft Lite: The Blyton Summer Detective's Club return to the lakeside town where they solved their cases as teens and face off against prehistoric fish monsters and a lake sized tentacle flailing elder god from the far reaches of space and prove up to the task.
• Magical Native American: In this universe, ancient folklore says the Walla Walla Indians confronted the wheezers (the "First Dwellers") in prehistoric times, and their shaman Ashen Fox defeated their god Thtaggoa with his powers. Modern-day Walla Walla tribe member Deputy Copperseed is a pretty down-to-earth, no-nonsense By-the-Book Cop, but when pressed he reveals he's both familiar with this ancient legend and puts more credence in it than he initially lets on.
• Meaningful Name: At first it seems like the name of Sleepy Lake is ironic, and an indication that Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here. Then we find out that it's very meaningful indeed — the Walla Walla named it that because it literally puts people and animals to sleep and otherwise dulls their senses and impairs their judgment, thanks to the noxious fumes seeping from the water. At first this seems like a Doing In the Wizard mundane explanation for the supernatural events surrounding the lake; it then turns out that the supernatural threat is very real (the wheezies live below the lake because it's where their natural atmosphere has been preserved).
• Mythology Gag: One of Tim's canine ancestors, George, was a female dog with a masculine name, much like Andy's original inspiration George from The Famous Five.
  • The river that feeds into Sleepy Lake is the fictional "Zoinx River", obviously named for Shaggy's catchphrase from Scooby-Doo.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nate's Idiot Ball tendency to carelessly read the words of magic spells out loud while trying to decipher them; multiple times, he brings wheezer attacks down on everyone's heads this way, and has the horrifying suspicion he caused this whole crisis by reading the Necronomicon and summoning Damian Deboën's spirit Back from the Dead in 1977 (a la The Evil Dead (1981)).
  • Subverted. This is a massive case of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain instead — Deboën was alive and impersonating his daughter Dunia the whole time, and he'd just left the Necronomicon open in the process of using it to try to summon and bind the spirit of his greatest enemy, the shaman Ashen Fox. By reading the spell and completing the ritual, Nate resurrected the Big Good of this setting, binding him to the body of the BSDC's Team Pet, and in so doing ensured the world would be saved.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: By bringing the Necronomicon to Sleepy Lake, Damian Deboën hoped to finally complete a ritual that would free Thtaggoa from his shackles and bring the world to an end. Instead, that ritual, performed in reverse, banishes Thtaggoa once and for all.
  • Thomas Wickley, the Harmless Villain in the rubber mask, actually unwittingly saved the world by interrupting the first ritual thirteen years ago in his ignorant search for Deboën's family gold. The meddling kids may see him as a patsy whose unfortunate presence enabled the cover-up, but it turns out if he hadn't been there Deboën would've completed the ritual and ended the world that very night.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Word of God is the author can't imagine anyone playing Andy in a hypothetical film adaptation of this book but Michelle Rodriguez.
• Painting the Medium: The book's narration makes plenty of references to the fact that it is a book, talking about characters not knowing if they'll "live to the end of this paragraph", describing "two blank lines of shocked silence" after two actual blank lines in the text, and at one memorable moment having a chapter break after Nate is dragged away by wheezers to an Uncertain Doom only for Andy to "refuse to let the chapter end this way" and charge in after him.
  • Cordero also continues his Creator Thumbprint from earlier works of switching to a script/screenplay format whenever writing lengthy dialogue scenes, including using this to make Behind the Black jokes of revealing a character's appearance with their first line of dialogue.
• Public Domain Artifact: The main plot revolves around Damian Deboën's discovery of the Necronomicon, the good ol' Tome of Eldritch Lore that's appeared in many a Lovecraft-inspired Cosmic Horror Story, in this case containing the spell needed to finally awaken Thtaggoa from his slumber or, recited backwards, to banish him for good.
• The Reveal:
  • The mysterious cloaked figure leaving clues for the Blyton Summer Detective Club was their missing member, Peter, Back from the Dead.
  • The resurrected Peter turns out to have just been a puppet for the real Big Bad, Dunia Deboën, the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter who turns out to have always been her father assuming a new identity after Faking the Dead.
  • One last reveal before the end of the story: Nate performing a resurrection ritual the first time he read the Necronomicon aloud isn't a Red Herring, even though we now know the Big Bad was already alive the whole time. He did bring a spirit back from the dead... the spirit of the Big Good, the shaman Ashen Fox, who now lives as a possessing spirit in the BSDC's Team Pet Tim.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Everyone thinks the last of the BSDC's cases, the Case of the Sleepy Lake Creature, ended the way all of them did, with an ordinary human villain in a silly rubber mask having faked everything for crude financial gain. The thing is, this is false, and a cover-up designed to blame the events of that night on a patsy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time — and all of them know it but have Repressed Memories of the true supernatural events of that night.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The ancient shaman Ashen Fox of the ancestor civilization of the Walla Walla Indians confronted the First Dwellers (the "wheezers") and their Undergod Thtaggoa and trapped them beneath the Mount of Thunder (the collapsed volcano that formed Sleepy Lake), where they fell into slumber. The necromancer Daniel Deboën was able to trick the titular meddling kids into helping complete a ritual to wake them up.
• Shout-Out: The byline of the local newspaper article about the teens' 1977 Sleepy Lake Monster case is "Nancy Hardy".
• Small Reference Pools: Cantero's original concept for his manuscript was The Famous Five meets the Cthulhu Mythos, but he discovered that the Famous Five are much less well-known in the United States than they are to a European audience, forcing him to make his characters Composite Characters of the Famous Five with their most famous American Expies, the Scooby-Doo gang.
• Spoofy-Doo: A dark deconstruction of the Scooby-Doo canon. The story features a former group of mystery-solving teens who are now adults dealing with serious psychological issues (one of them is an alcoholic, another is in a mental hospital, and the team leader, based on Fred from Scooby-Doo, is dead, having committed suicide). Eventually it turns out that the said issues have to do with the repressed traumatic memories of having encountered a real Eldritch Abomination during their last investigation.
• Tomboyish Name: Andy always introduces herself by that name and calling her "Andrea" is a Berserk Button (one that in a heroic moment Joey uses to rouse her out of a CO2-induced slumber). Nowadays it's not that uncommon for women to go by "Andi" or "Andie", but Andy always spells it with the masculine -y.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Very much averted. Part of the mission statement for this story was taking a stereotypical Michelle Rodriguez character, making her the protagonist who's central to the story, and giving her a happy ending where she gets the girl.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The wheezers live off of carbon dioxide and are poisoned by oxygen. They cannot survive for any length of time in fresh, clean air, whereas any constant source of combustion creates CO2 pockets they can hide in. (The book lampshades how this becomes an accidental Green Aesop.)
• You Can't Go Home Again: The Blyton Summer Detective Club used to see the town of Blyton Hills as a second home and a "paradise", according to Andy. The trauma from their experience at Sleepy Lake turned the town into a trigger for them and ensured they never came back; when they finally do show up again after many years, they find the town a run-down shell of its former glory, thanks to an economic depression that hit in the meantime. It's an especially painful moment when the formerly upstanding and respected Captain Al Urich has become "Crazy Al" who lives at the junkyard, thanks both to his poverty after he lost his farm and his own PTSD from that night's events.
• You Meddling Kids: An homage to the whole concept and the trope namers, most notably The Scooby Gang. The meddling kids are now in their mid twenties and return to the lakeside community where they unmasked their last monster as teenagers only to end up confronting real Lovecraftian horrors.
  • The ending subverts this, with the true Big Bad ranting that she'd have gotten away with it if not for that "meddling kid"... by which she means Thomas Wickley, the decoy villain in the goofy mask initially blamed for her crimes. It turns out that by stumbling into the middle of her evil ritual looking for the gold buried in the mansion, he's the one who ruined her evil plan and delayed the apocalypse for the next thirteen years. And even though he was 47 years old at the time, for a centuries-old necromancer everyone else qualifies as a "kid".

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