Research Randy reads like YA, and can be if you want it to be. It’s also a weird mash-up of cosmic horror, eldritch terrors, nostalgia trip and a meta love letter to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.
The stars of a beloved series of children’s books, the clever Research Randy and his supernaturally sensitive sister Charlie, solved many cases in the idyllic coastal town of Serenity Bay to the delight of many readers over the last 30 years.
But now, suddenly transported to the creepy hamlet of Effingmouth, they find themselves in a bizarre place where nothing is what it seems, people are strange and secretive, and something awful lurks in the shadows.
This might be a mystery they don’t want to solve.
First things first, that first line of the description above? The one that says, “Research Randy reads like YA, and can be if you want it to be.”?
Yeah, no. Don’t believe that. This is not a book you want to be reading to a child, at least not past the first third of the book.
Okay, so this bizarre little book… What starts out as a slightly left-of-centre pastiche of Encyclopedia Brown meets the Hardy Boys, takes very little time to take a couple of non-Euclidian turns before devolving into an incredibly dark Cyclopean Nightmare meets Lovecraft and Bierce in the Robert W. Chambers of Pain and Despair.
Lucas does a fine job of initially building a book that seems like it’s going to be a fun little romp with some smart, yet clueless kid detectives, but his skill as an author and the way he ultimately breaks the fourth wall to make this as nightmarish as possible? Yeah, so well done. You’re literally reading the account of an author of a popular YA series lose his mind in the most Lovecraftian manner, while his characters fall prey to a deeper madness, not necessarily of the author’s doing.
Seriously, this book is just impressive as all hell. I saw something on social media from the publisher sending out physical ARCs to interested reviewers, so I thought, hey, it’s Lovecraftian, what could go wrong? But when I got it, I actually sat on it for a few days, because, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure about this book when I first looked at it, but man, having read it, I absolutely loved it by the end.
And the illustrations? They just add that little bit of extra fun to the proceedings.
This book is available for pre-order through Amazon, and it comes out October 30, 2023. And trust me, you’ll want to get it.
My one complaint is, there’s literally no grandmas in this book, nor is there any Pie of Despair, half-eaten or not. Bummer!
PRE-ORDER HERE!
