Review - Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero 

Published 1st April 2018 by Titan Publishing Group

Star Rating - **.5

Goodreads Challenge - 28/50

Synopsis (from Goodreads)

New York Times Best Seller Awarded 4th Best Horror Novel in 2017 Good Reads Awards 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 Deboen 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. Author BiographyEdgar Cantero is a writer and cartoonist from Barcelona who works in Catalan, Spanish, and English. He is the author of The Supernatural.

My Thoughts

I saw this one around on book Twitter and was definitely intrigued by the premise and the fact that it was a take on the Scooby Doo series. I was kindly sent a copy by a wonderful book lover on Twitter and thought it would be the perfect spooky, Halloween read. Here are my thoughts...

What I liked 
• The fact that this book is based on Scooby Doo. As you can tell by the title this book plays homage to some of the key ideas in the Scooby Doo series including a familiar line up of characters and their dog and the mystery solving aspects. 

• The storyline was fun. I thought the plot was interesting and suitably creepy for this time of year. There were definitely aspects of this plot where you need to suspend your disbelief but I didn't mind that as I generally enjoy more fantastical reads. 

• The characters were interesting. They each had quite distinct personalities and we're affected by the events prior to this novel in different ways. There were not any dislikeable characters however, I would of liked a bit more growth across the course of the novel. 

What I didn't like 
• The way this was written! That's definitely what lowered my rating on this one. There were parts that were written well, easy to read and enjoyable however there were times when the author chose to do, in my opinion, some quite odd things. He often wrote bits in italics that were written in a different perspective, as well as this he also sometimes chose to write dialogue in a different way. These things really pulled me out of the story which was a shame. The author also had a tendency to write quite lengthy descriptions about seemingly insignificant things. For example there was an unnecessary description of a characters hair that went on for one and a half pages! This didn't really add anything to the story. 

Overall I enjoyed the actual story quite a lot and it was a good job too because if I wasn't enjoying it as much as I was the writing style probably would of caused me to DNF this one which is a shame as I was really looking forward to it.

Overall Rating (2.5*)