When Quinn and her father move to a tiny town with a weird clown for a mascot, they're looking for a fresh start. But ever since the town's only factory shut 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 threw the party where Arthur Hill's daughter died. They're 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 old and new, tradition and progress. It's a fight that 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.
I’ve only been to Albuquerque, New Mexico once in my life—and that was more than enough. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was sometime around seventh or eighth grade, back when my family was traveling with a carnival. I hated that stop from the moment we pulled in. Within a day, my left eye had swollen shut, and I was forced to wear an eye patch. Spoiler alert: it’s not nearly as fun as pirates make it look.
The third night we were there, after the midway had shut down, my younger brother and I got hungry and decided to walk three blocks to what I think was a Whataburger. We were passing what looked like a car lot when a dog rushed the fence. We bolted across the street—and that’s when I saw what was in the window of the building we’d just reached. I immediately turned around and ran right back across. I’d rather take my chances with a guard dog than face a creepy-ass mechanical clown moving in a store window in the middle of the night.
I don’t like clowns. I never have. They’re wrong in a way that gets under your skin. There’s something about those painted faces—those fixed smiles—that hides whatever’s really underneath. Look at John Wayne Gacy. That’s reason enough. I hate them so much that a friend once bought me a shirt that said, Can’t sleep. Clowns will eat me. They thought it was funny. I thought it was prophetic.
Once, at a Hometown Buffet, a clown came in to make balloon animals. I left mid-meal, plate still full. I wasn’t about to sit there while that greasepainted demon floated toward my table. Clowns are my boogeyman.
Now, I do better when the clowns are fictional—on a page or a screen. Since they’re not physically in my space, I can manage. In a perverse way, I even enjoy testing the limits of what I can handle when it comes to dealing with them. Naturally, since I don’t have to look at them, I prefer reading about those murderous fiends from hell. Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare is chock-full of them.
I won’t go into too many details because I don’t want to spoil the blood-soaked fun, but I will say this: the body count is massive—at least 33 people die, many by crossbow. The book is bloody without being gory, something I’m eternally thankful for. I love horror, but I’ve never been a fan of gore for gore’s sake. The humor is dark (which is probably why I loved it so much), and the queer representation is surprisingly good—without falling into the “bury your gays” trope that annoys the hell out of me.
It’s a lot of fun for a teen slasher novel. The author clearly loves the genre and plays with its tropes in a way that feels fresh instead of tired. I had an absolute blast reading it, and while the movie version was enjoyable, I—unsurprisingly—prefer the book. Now I just need to read the sequels.
And just in case you were wondering, the reason my eye swelled shut in Albuquerque was because of mountain cedar, which is everywhere there. I didn’t find that out until much later, when I had an allergy scratch test done where I now live—far from New Mexico. Apparently, the winds blow the pollen all the way here, which is why they test for it. That little test spot swelled to the size of a fifty-cent piece and stayed that way for a week. So yeah—Albuquerque will be a city I never visit again.
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