Thursday, August 17, 2017

What is Edgar Cantero reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Edgar Cantero, author of Meddling Kids.

His entry begins:
I recently moved houses (actually, moved cities, from Barcelona to New York), and I was forced to leave all my books behind. All of them. If you wonder about their fate, I was supposed to rent a storage unit, but in the end, a good friend offered me the attic of his family’s house in his hometown in Pla d’Urgell. There they are, sleeping inches below the roof under a scorching sun.

I’ve been living in Brooklyn for eighteen days now, and in my room there are already five books.

John Le Carré’s Call From The Dead (1961) I read on the plane to the US after forgetting to send it to my friend’s attic with the rest. I could have abandoned it in Spain, but I liked the edition too much. It’s a Spanish translation printed like a pulp magazine. I knew Smiley already from the recent film with Gary Oldman, which I loved. I liked Le Carré’s style too: so...[read on]
About Meddling Kids, from the publisher:
With raucous humor and brilliantly orchestrated mayhem, Meddling Kids subverts teen detective archetypes like the Hardy Boys, the Famous Five, and Scooby-Doo, and delivers an exuberant and wickedly entertaining celebration of horror, love, friendship, and many-tentacled, interdimensional demon spawn.

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 Deboën 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.
Visit Edgar Cantero's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Supernatural Enhancements.

Writers Read: Edgar Cantero.

--Marshal Zeringue