Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

 

(pb; 2020: YA novel. First book in Frendo/Clown in a Cornfield trilogy. Followed by Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives!)

 

From the back cover

“Quinn Maybrook just wants to make it to graduation, but she might not make it to morning. When Quinn and her father moved to a tiny town with a weird clown for a mascot, they were looking for a fresh start. But ever since the town’s only factory closed down, Kettle Springs has been cracked in half.

“Most of the town believes that the kids are to blame. After all, the juniors and seniors at Kettle Springs high are the ones who set the abandoned factory on fire and who spend all their time posting pranks on YouTube. They have no respect and no idea what it means to work hard.

“For the kids, it’s the other way around. And now Kettle Springs is caught in a constant battle between the old and new, tradition and progress. It’s a fight looks like it will destroy the town. Until one homicidal clown with a porkpie hat and a red nose decides to end it for good. Because if your opponents all die, you win the debate by default.”

 

Review

Clown is a great, if sometimes overwritten (and sometimes plot-convenient-character-dumb, even for a slasher story) novel.

Criticism first.

I get that many of the characters are emotionally tumultuous adolescents and adults, but some of their melodramatic behavior (not adapting to oh-so-necessary survival mode when they have seconds to live) jarred me out of the otherwise beguiling read. I further understand that this is a YA novel where emotions are writ large in Crayola colors like obvious graffiti on an alley wall, but certain characters seem to be kind of dumb, having to learn the same fatal-for-others lessons over and over.

I also had difficulty buying into one of its central conceits, considering how many single-minded characters feel about others, and the violence resulting from those angry feelings. The sheer number of these aggressors, Frendo-friendly or otherwise, didn’t strike me as realistic, even with what’s going on now in the real world.

And some of the action/kill scenes run way too long, with certain characters getting way too much time to emote. Friday the 13^th (1980) kill-scene concise Clown is not.

It should be noted that for a Young Adult [YA] book, Clown has a lot of profanity, particularly f-bombs—this is not a complaint, merely a caveat for readers not anticipating Cesare’s constant, character-realistic use of profanity.

 

Praise.

For the most part, though, Cesare’s writing flows well, not a full-on horror book until six or so chapters in. It’s often pop-culture/our-current zeitgeist stellar, bordering on addictive, with cinema-worthy scenes—not surprisingly, the resulting film, directed and co-penned by Eli Craig, is scheduled for a stateside 5/9/25 release.