Coulrophobia and Corn: A Teenage Nightmare

Once, when I was in high school, some friends and I watched the Stephen King film Children of the Corn, and then drove a few miles out of town to run around a local cornfield in the dark. The cornstalks were high above our heads, and it wasn’t long before we couldn’t see one another, having moved around from row to row. That feeling of isolation, of completely losing your bearings (even with knowing that following the row was the way out) was insanely creepy. I won’t say that it scarred me, but I’ll never forget that feeling. At least there were no clowns.

Adam Cesare’s 2020 effort, Clown in a Cornfield, has remedied that for the teenager in me. A fun, scary thrill ride from its opening pages to the final conclusion, it combines the typical teenage angst/fear of the future with the exhilaration (and occasional meta-ness) of watching a great slasher film.

We follow Quinn, the new girl in Kettle Springs (get it? Kettle? Corn?), as she navigates her first few days in school. She and her father, the new town doctor, have shown up just in time for Founder’s Day, a fall celebration of the town punctuated by the appearance(s) of Frendo, the clown mascot of the recently closed corn syrup plant. Quinn quickly falls in with the ‘popular’ kids (and a couple of not-so-popular kids) as they prepare for the weekend. Of course, as teenagers with a long weekend sometimes do, they’ve planned a kegger out in a barn in the middle of nowhere.

But not quite nowhere, as things turn out. Not long after the party begins, a murderous Frendo with a crossbow begins picking students off. From this point on, Clown in a Cornfield becomes an intense, gloriously gory slasher, with Quinn and her new friends (and lots of other students) just trying to survive the night.

While it could be easy to think of this as mere exploitation, the fact is that Cesare takes his time with world building and characterization. We care about Quinn and her dad. We care about her new friends, possibly because we either see ourselves or an old friend in them. However, the amount of blood and guts in this book can’t be ignored. If Rob Zombie were to direct a teen slasher pic, this would be the one. Once the red stuff starts flying, it’s relentless.

Cesare’s writing strikes a delicate balance–descriptive enough to place precise images in our minds’ eye, but maintaining the necessary pace that thrillers such as this need to succeed.

And succeed it does. Clown in a Cornfield is a lot of fun, and I look forward to picking up some of his other books. Well done, Mr. Cesare, for telling a great tale and keeping clowns scary, as they should be.