Clown in a Cornfield – Adam Cesar

Trigger Warning: Violence, gore

Blurb:
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:
This book follows Quinn as her and her dad move to the small town of Kettle Springs from Philadelphia after Quinns’ mother dies. The small town is a shock to Quinn as all she knows is Philadelphia and having loads of neighbours compared to this little town where her closest neighbour is down the road.

The first shock comes when Quinn looks out of her bedroom window and is met by an image of a clown, that has been painted on the side of a burned-out factory. She quickly learns that something odd is going on between the adults and the kids in this town over the next four days until on the 4th day there is a party in an abandoned cornfield and things go horribly wrong when Clowns start appearing and killing the kids.

I enjoyed this book, but I found that some of the rep was just there to make it diverse. E.g. one of the characters – Janet – was described as Asian… but nothing further to describe her, to me it just felt like Cesar was putting in that detail to make the book less white. There are also two characters that are LGBT, but again I found that it was put in to be diverse.

What I really did enjoy was the disconnect between the adults and teenagers. There a lack of understanding on both sides and each side believing that they were right in their thinking, which I believe is a really great description of things in the real world.

I do think this was a good book overall and is a good recommendation for people who enjoy gore, it reminded me of a slasher film e.g. Scream of The house of Wax.