The tone of this book was really challenging for me. I love a bit of whimsy and some meta injected into my fiction, that can be a lot of fun, but in Meddling Kids, the author seemed to be having things two ways. Cantero wanted to write a scary horror book about a grown up, emotionally traumatized version of the Scooby Gang, but he also wanted to make silly references to the Scooby universe—in particular, every mention of the "Zoinx River" (which was not at all relevant to the plot of the story but still got brought up several times) made me roll my eyes and took me out of things.