Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

Will contain spoilers!

Genre/s:

YA Horror

Themes:

Violence, Revenge

Rating:

Description:

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.

My thoughts:

Clown in a Cornfield is exactly what I was expecting it to be, a slasher movie but in book form. The fact that it was YA and still really violent and gory was really interesting, I’m not used to seeing horror books within this genre that are as violent as this and it made this book much more shocking. I will say the storyline is kind of predictable and we do know pretty much what is going to happen from the start, there is also a lot of foreboding in the first half. I did enjoy the story and the characters, but I did find the motivations behind it all to be very farfetched.

We see most of the main characters right from the very start, they are a group of teenagers who do pranks for views online. They are doing exactly this when Coles little sister attempts to jump off a high block into the reservoir they are at, it goes badly and she ends up dying.

Quinn and her dad have just moved to town, he has taken a new job as the towns doctor and even buys the old doctors house. Quinns mum died, we later find out from an overdose after getting hooked on opioids after injuring herself, and they are both looking for a fresh start. Straight away she notices weird things about the town, on her first day at school some students are complaining about a test and the teacher just freaks out and kicks them all out of class. Quinn is shocked and thinks that the teacher should be fired for acting that way to them, she ends up letting out a nervous laugh and gets kicked out with them. This is when Quinn meets Janet, Ronnie, Tucker and Cole the pranksters from before. Its quite clear they are seen as the troublemakers in town and people’s impression of Cole has changed recently but so has he, it seems he wants to stay out of trouble. We find out Cole set fire to his family’s syrup refinery when he was drunk. The townspeople hate him for it even though the place had been shut down for a while, its like they were holding onto hope it would reopen and Cole took that away. Quinn gets invited to a party that they are having the next night.

Later that evening at a diner in town with her dad Quinn notices that there are no kids in the place. Which is weird as back home it would be full of teenagers. The sherriff comes in and even seeing Cole and co outside makes all these adults jumpy, there is quite a clear divide between the young and old in this town. The next day is Founders day and there is a parade, the 5 of them were banned from going but they all end up there anyway. They have planned a prank to play, Cole wants nothing to do with it but the rest of them have set up fireworks to go off. It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal but someone ends up setting off actual explosives and causes one of the cars to go on fire putting some boy scouts in danger.

The night this happens the mayor and sheriff have an emergency meeting but nobody really listens to the mayor. The sheriff takes over and decides he will deputise people to basically make them members of the police force. He lets the mayor know that this does not apply to him and gets him to leave. Its clear the mayor does not agree with the people here but can do nothing to stop them. Turns out they were all having town improvement meetings and with tensions getting higher its clear something bad is going to happen.

It quite quickly gets very violent after that, the mayor is killed by someone dressed as the towns clown mascot. The kids are also all heading to a party that night but Tucker is running late and his mum has taken the car. He texts his friends to pick him up but no one does. He notices someone hanging around outside in a clown costume, he thinks at first it is his friends playing a prank. Until this man who is bigger than Tuck attacks him, he puts up a good fight and almost manages to call the cops but ends up getting his throat slit.

The rest of the gang are on their way to the party when they almost hit someone in the road dressed as a clown. This time it does end up being a prank when they notice it is made of straw and Ronnie and her boyfriend Matt appear laughing. They have also decided to wear clown costumes this evening. They park their cars and make their way through the cornfields to a barn where there is music and alcohol. Cole and Quinn run into her new neighbor, Rust, who doesn’t seem to be very popular but its clear him and Cole were very good friends at one time. After some dancing Quinn goes out to get some air and they see a person dressed like a clown in the cornfield. Someone has also gone to Quinns house and taken her dad, he was not killed but brought to a pretty dirty place and basically told to do what he is told or die.

The clown at the cornfield has a cross bow and starts shooting at the teenagers and killing them. They see what is happening and all hell breaks loose as kids are killed and running either to the barn, the cornfields or an old silo. Quinn and Janet are together and it really seems like the shooter is going for Janet specifically. They decide to make a run for the cornfields but Janet gets shot in the shoulder. Once they are undercover in the fields they find Rust, he is a hunter so has guns. Quinn is pretty against it having never used a gun and being against them. But Rust quickly teaches her how to use them after they do their best to patch Janet up.

Cole ends up in the silo with Ronnie and Matt, he wants to go out and help people but the other two put him off. He ends up fighting them to get the door open and the shooter manages to shoot into the silo. Cole gets close with a bolt and manages to cut the attacker. Soon the clown sets the barn on fire with a bunch of kids in it, he picks off any who try to escape. Rust and Quinn make their way back and manage to shoot the lock off the barn and the teenagers pile out. The clown reappears and Quinn manages to shot him and it seems something in her snaps. Rust has to stop her from shooting more than twice.

They think the danger is over until Janet overhears someone out in the cornfield asking about the primary targets. It seems these new people are working with the clown and more people are involved than they thought. Janet plucks up the courage to warn the other teenagers that there is more than one and they are not safe. Janet ends up being decapitated by a chainsaw. Rust and Quinn run to the silo when Cole opens the door but Matt and Ronnie get it shut again. They are being chased by the clowns at this point, Quinn and Rust manage to kill and injure a few including shooting the hand off one. They manage to make their escape throguh a tunnel in the silo while Rust sets off some explosives in the front knowinng he likely wont make it out.

Its not a fun climb and they have to dig a bit at the end but they get out and head towards the road. A truck drives past, Quinn and Cole speak to the driver and it seems they will win him over until Matt snaps and the guy drives off. The next car they see is the sheriff, they try to explain what is happening but after getting a bunch of calls and then seeing Cole here the sheriff arrests Cole and puts him in the back of his car. It soon becomes clear that the sheriff has been injured and a few things click into place, he is one of the clowns and no one can help them. It also turns out that Matt and Ronnie have been working with them all along explains why they were dressed as clowns and the prank earlier.

Cole ends up being taken to the old refinery where we discover that his father is in on this plot too. Turns out his dad blames him for his sisters death and then for destroying the refinery. He wants to kill his own son as some sort of revenge. They plan on hanging him from the rafters after framing him for the deaths at the field along with his friends. They feel that the teenagers are the reason for all the problems in the town rather than the passage of times and things changing. The older generation feel that without the teenagers they can make the town great again.

Quinn is running from Matt and Ronnie when she gets to the farmhouse, there is a truck outside but the keys must be in the hosue. There she finds a cleaver, the keys and a dead clown. But Ronnie catches up with her and they fight, Quinn ends up jumping out of the shower and covering Ronnie with the curtain. She manages to kill her with the cleaver, Quinn becomes ok with killing pretty quickly but I’m sure this will affect her later. She manages to get to the truck but Matt is outside, he crashes and she hits him trying to get away in the manual car.

At this point Quinns dad has been giving medical attention to the clowns including the woman who got her hand shot off who is actually the waitress from the diner. It seems everyone else is distracted and the waitress is dead, he takes her clown outfit and heads off to see if he can find Quinn. She has turned up at the refinery just before Cole is hanged. He still ends up being pushed off but his neck isnt broken because the rope got caught. Rust appears in his truck just in time to save Cole. There is a fight and they manage to take down the sheriff but Coles dad escapes after being injured. This is when Quinns dad turned up so he didn’t really mange to do anything but I kind of liked that the teenagers saved themselves. After this Cole and Rust kiss and now it makes sense why Cole never showed any interest in the girls who clearly liked him.

Quinn and her dad stay in the area and now with the clowns cleared out and Coles dad presumed dead they manage to use his money to invest in the town. They are also very quick to remove any mentions of the clown. But right at the end we find out Coles dad got away and now he wants to do the job himself.

I did enjoy this story it was thrilling and I really wanted to know what was going to happen. The writing style was also very good and this made it a really easy read. It is YA but it still has all the gore and violence you would expect in a horror. My main issue with this book is that it doesn’t seem very believeable. I struggle with the idea that the older people in the town would be willing to murder their own children. It seemed far to easy for the sherriff to convince the town to turn on the kids, especially in such a violent way. I get that they were unhappy and angry with the teenagers but this just seems a bit too far fetched. I also didn’t really connect with any of the charcters which made it hard for me to care about them. I did enjoy that they managed to stand up for themselves especially Quinn who hasn’t been around to see the tensions of the town. She was another who managed to kill a bit too easily but I feel the heat of the moment and her own survival spurred her on until she couldn’t stop or she’d die.

I do think this book did exactly what it said it was going to and it does end up being better than a lot of horror movies I’ve seen. I like that its a slasher and we can’t really be sure who is going to die and who survives. I also enjoyed the twist at the end and I look forward to reading the next one.