#Spooktober ‘Clown In A Cornfield’ by Adam Cesare

About the book…

Quinn Maybrook just wants to make it until graduation. She might not make it to morning.

Quinn and her father moved to tiny, boring Kettle Springs to find a fresh start. But ever since the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory shut down, Kettle Springs has cracked in half. On one side are the adults, who are desperate to make Kettle Springs great again, and on the other are the kids, who want to have fun, make prank videos, and get out of Kettle Springs as quick as they can.

Kettle Springs is caught in a battle between old and new, tradition and progress. It’s a fight that looks like it will destroy the town.

Until Frendo, the Baypen mascot, a creepy clown in a pork-pie hat, goes homicidal and decides that the only way for Kettle Springs to grow back is to cull the rotten crop of kids who live there now.

Fresh starts all over sound like a great idea, they present an opportunity to re-invent yourself, distance yourself from trauma and the occasional associated societal shaming that this brings, which is exactly what Quinn and her dad are looking for in this small, middle of nowhere town surrounded by corn fields.

Except…the town which looks so quiet and provincial on the outside, has some deep, dark secrets of its own and before long, the youth of the town are fighting back against prejudice, conformity, and traditions. This goes further than an outrageous haircut or a visible piercing,and as a bloody swathe is cutting down the tall poppies of the younger generation, survival has never seemed so necessary and yet so unreachable.

Quinn is a great character, she provides the main narrative arc, allowing us to see Kettle Spring as an outsider and bringing us into the story, you are rooting for her and her dad, who is filling the recently vacated spot of town doctor, to be able to have the time and space to heal from the death of Quinn’s mum.

Her new girl status is very well exemplified in all too realistic high school scenes as she tries to work out the pecking order, and where, and whether, she wants to try and fit in.

Her instincts that there is something just a little off about the town quickly come to be proven correct as an end of year party with locally recognised bad boy and disturber of the peace-also potential arsonist-Cole, in the middle of the eponymous cornfields, descends into a bloodbath.

Using the allegory of the slasher movie/novel to explore the resistance of adults to accept accountability for their actions, blaming others and making them scapegoats, is so well done here. Adam Cesare does not flinch when it comes to killing off well established characters, he makes you wince in certain places (no spoilers!)and take a momentary breather/short walk to clear your head at others.

It takes traditional tropes, gives them a mighty twist, and presents the masked up emblem of societal repression in a clown form, which really resonated with me ,especially thinking back to the way the attacks on civil liberties lately have been defined by the masking up, the hiding of identities in order to present a mass of protestation , which is actually pretty terrifying. The Trumpian clown figure is absolutely nail bitingly scary because the mask is that person’s identity, the person, by putting it on they become more, not less, of themselves. This struck me again this morning after reading , and seeing , more pictures of the rioters at Capitol Hill. Their ‘costume’ of white, mostly male privilege, decked in the American flag, and hunting paraphernalia will never not be chilling .

And here, where the costume represents the one thing which Kettle Spring is famous for, the overlapping of corporate/individual identity for a ‘greater good’, as well as the blaming of kids for their perceived lapses in morals and inability to make good decisions, regardless that these adults were once children too, really hit home.

I had to wrestle this from my teen daughter, and tell her it needed me to go through it for precautionary measures -ahem!- before having to hide it on a daily basis in order to read it in peace. It may be directed at Y.A readers, but I will say it again as it bears repeating, a good story well told has no age limits and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute spent in those creepy ass clown infested cornfields. And yes I gave my daughter my copy, because the sequel, Frendo Lives, landed on the doorstep!

About the author…

Adam Cesare is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia. His books include ‘Clown In A Cornfield‘, ‘Video Night’, ‘The Summer Job’, and ‘Zero Lives Remaining’.

He’s an avid fan of horror cinema and runs Project: Black T-Shirt, a YouTube review show where he takes horror films and pairs them with reading suggestions.

Links-http://www.adamcesare.com/

Twitter @Adam_Cesare