The Completist: CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD by Adam Cesare

Coulrophobia: the fear of clowns. The setting of a cornfield (Lost in a Maize over at TVTropes). Two prominent and familiar horror elements, so if you combine a creepy clown figure with the tried-and-true setting of cornfields, you’ve got two great tastes that taste great together in the horror genre. Thus, we have Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield trilogy. 

The first novel in the series, Clown in a Cornfield (published in 2020) introduces readers to Quinn Maybrook, who moved from Philadelphia to Kettle Springs, MO with her father (a Doctor) after the death of her mother. Kettle Springs fits the trope of many such stories: that of a town seemingly passed by the future. A once booming industry/company was at the center or Kettle Springs – The Baypen Corn Syrup Factory, which recently closed and was burned down.

Before we meet Quinn; however, Cesare introduces some of the local Kettle Spring teens hanging out at a flooded rock quarry. As teenagers are won’t to do, they dare each other to do something dangerous and potentially stupid: dive into the water. When one of the kids doesn’t resurface, the tone of the novel (and series) is largely set: there will be deaths.

Quinn is barely settled into her new home and school when Frendo the Clown makes its appearance known. Quinn is invited by her newfound friend Cole Hill (whose father happens to own Baypen) and his friends Janet, Ronnie, Matt, and Tucker to join the Founder’s Day party (the typical small-town celebration) as well as the after-party in the neighboring cornfield. Frendo shows up at the after-party, uninvited, and starts killing people. Frendo was the mascot of the Baypen Corn Syrup company, but its face and appearance have been appropriated – much like the Ghostface from the Scream film franchise – so people could begin murdering the teenagers. Especially the “troublesome” kids. Classic slasher, kill the kids. But who? We don't exactly have a Billy Loomis figure here, but Cesare doesn't try to give a red herring in that way.

Horror has often been laced with social commentary and Cesare picks up that baton from his predecessors. The parents of this community are somewhat locked in their ways, they don’t have much trust in their kids and the kids who live in Kettle Springs. The death at the rock quarry only hones those thoughts even more. One might even say these parents want to make Kettle Springs great again. There’s very much an undercurrent of that “things were better when we were younger, these kids are ruining everything” mentality that can easily lead down a path of toxicity.

Some of those adults include Cole’s father Athur Hill, Sheriff Dunn, a waitress named Trudy, among others, but Arthur and Sheriff Dunn serve as the primary antagonists of the novel who drive the adults to take care of their kids’s mistakes. 

The first novel, then, has elements of the expected (but very much heightened) friction between two generations; slashers; and small town with dark secrets. Think one part Stand by Me, one part Footloose, and one part Scream.

Clown in a Cornfield is an impressive, compulsively addictive novel. Cesare manages to craft a story that has appeal to hardcore horror fans (like myself) as well as a story that is welcoming to readers not as into the genre. The book is published by Harper Teen and has that YA appeal with the youthful protagonists at odds with adult antagonists. For his efforts and the quality that is the outcome of those wonderful efforts, Adam Cesare received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Clown in a Cornfield. I haven’t read the other books on the finalist list from that year, but I can say I am not surprised in the least that Cesare won the award.

The second book, Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, picks up about a year after the events of the first novel. Few have survived the onslaught of Frendo (or rather, Frendos), although Quinn is one of the survivors as are Cole and Rusty, who are now officially a couple. Quinn is at college in Philadelphia and thanks to a “documentary” called The Baypen Hoax nobody believes that what happened to Quinn and her friends is real. Even when she is attacked by another Frendo during a college party at the same time her father is attached by a Frendo back in Kettle Springs. Quinn is still at the center of the story in the second installment, the heart of everything.

Of course, Cole, Rusty, and Quinn return to Kettle Springs where they learn of conspiracies and an internet movement around Frendo, #FrendoLives, which gives us the subtitle of the second novel. There’s a good bit of social commentary in this book again, such as that internet movement and how many people think the events in Kettle Spring are a hoax. Not quite social commentary, but a statement, I suppose is making the primary romantic couple in the book a gay couple. More than anything, it is a normalization of the relationship and it is quite welcome.

In general, I think Cesare did a great job of weaving these kinds of messages into the story, making them essential elements to the story, but not browbeating the reader with any heavy-handedness. Frendo definitely lives, there’s an army of Frendos at one point in a harrowing, pulse-pounding scene. Nobody really escapes this second installment unscathed and by the end, Quinn is a mentally and emotionally scarred young woman with a list and a purpose. 

The finale, Clown in a Cornfield 3: The Church of Frendo, is a departure in some ways from the two novels that preceded it which is not a bad thing at all. Again, though, Quinn is a heart of the novel. She is on a mission to find the various people who donned Frendo masks and tried to storm Kettle Springs in Frendo Lives. Joining Quinn is a young man named Johnny as well as the ghost of the original Frendo masked killer, Arthur Hill although only Quinn can see Arthur. The two regularly converse which makes clear that Quinn is Dealing With Some Shit, understandably.

While Quinn is tackling her hitlist, the “dream” of Frendo is still alive back in Kettle Springs. By dream, I mean church (as the title implies), but what I really mean is a cult. Cesare gives us a great sightline into this church/religious movement through a couple of the young girls whose parents are swept up (in more than one way) in the Church. Another thing Quinn isn’t quite aware of is that somebody is pursuing her. Rather, she knows she’s a recognizable individual and just might be a fugitive, but she isn't fully aware a sinister organization is hunting her just as she’s hunting the members of the Frendo mob.

The Church of Frendo, much like its two predecessors is an addictive read; the pacing is frantic (in a good way) and Cesare continues to give his characters depth, they engender empathy, they are relatable, and they are interesting. A very satisfying conclusion to Quinn Maybrook’s story. Cesare has intimated he may have more stories set in this world, if so, sign me up for them!

Cesare has managed to give horror fans a fascinating and complex take on the “Final Girl” in Quinn Maybrook. You can see elements of Sidney Prescott (Scream) and Nancy Thompson (A Nightmare on Elm Street). Quinn is not going to be kept down, she’s going to take charge of her destiny. Quinn felt very real to me, I couldn't help but root for her throughout the saga. As I said earlier, Clown in a Cornfield is one of those great stories that has appeal to long time horror readers (of which I count myself) and people curious about the genre or somewhat unfamiliar.

As I was writing up this review, I realize how little I mentioned the fact that this is a YA set of books. I think part of that is because my experience reading these books is that Cesare just told a great story, labels be damned. The imprint is Harper Teen and Cesare explicitly aimed these books at young adults. Be that as it may, do NOT let that dissuade you or let you think these books are "soft" or "tame." That’s part of what I was getting at in that these books will and should have wide appeal horror readers of all ages. There's blood, there's murder, there's adult themes. The social commentary is woven naturally and elegantly into the story and it isn’t tacked on.  

The bottom line: Clown in a Cornfield is a modern horror masterpiece and I am looking forward to more stories from Adam Cesare. 

I am also looking forward to see the film, which is written and directed by Eli Craig (Tucker & Dale vs Evil, Little Evil) which is in post-production as of this writing. It is listed on imdb, but I haven't seen too much official about it outside of this post at the venerable and indispensable Bloody Disgusting web site.

Friday Round-up: Dawson at SFFWorld & Gibson at Tor.com

Two reviews this week from yours truly, so let's get right into them, shall we?

I've been following Delilah S. Dawson on twitter for a few months now and she churns out great writing advice.  She ran a twitter contest for her new book Servants of the Storm and I was lucky enough to get a copy through that contest. Delilah marked up the book with some great Pop-up Video type behind the scenes notes, too. I thought the book was a lot of fun, from my review:

Savanah, Georgia is devastated by Hurricane Josephine, which drowns much of the city, killing people, and affecting many others in adverse ways. While Hurricane Josephine as depicted in Delilah Dawson’s Servants of the Storm is a fictional storm (and more than just a storm), the devastation such a catastrophe can inflict is too well known, just look to the recent past at the horror stories from Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy. Dawson takes that devastation and weaves a dark, horrific, supernatural thread into this novel through the eyes of first person narrator Dovey.

...

The city of Savannah comes alive very much as a character in its own right, both the seedy elements and dark supernatural entities pulling the strings of the plot. I also thought the monsters, demons, and spirits who haunted Dovey and her city came across as genuine and with a level of authenticity to be if not believable, but plausible. I visited Savannah almost 15 years ago so my memories of the city are confined to a tourist ghost walk, business meetings, and a brew pub (http://www.moonriverbrewing.com/), so I didn’t see the underbelly of the city or anything outside of the touristy spots. That having been said, after being so absorbed in Servants of the Storm, I feel like I visited Savannah and its dark environs in reality with how well Dovey conveys her travels through the city.

Tor.com also posted my review of the inventive Post-Apocalyptic novel from Gary Gibson, Extinction Game. This was as gripping read, too.

Told from the point of view of Jerry Beche, Extinction Game, is Gary Gibson’s foray into this subgenre after a string of successful Space Opera novels.

Through Jerry’s first person voice, we get an intimate portrait of a man losing his sanity despite surviving the initial apocalypse. He speaks with his dead wife, he wants to make sure the people responsible for her death, Red Harvest, get their just desserts. When Jerry finally ventures out of his ramshackle hovel, he finds other people. Unfortunately for Jerry, these people capture and interrogate him, and we soon learn they are from a parallel Earth—Jerry is one of many people extracted from an apocalyptic world to be trained as Pathfinders, specialists who plunder other Earths for hints of salvation.

My SFFWorld colleague Mark Chitty favorably reviewed Extinction Game for SFFWorld, too. 

New SF Reviews at SFFWorld - Howard and Heinlein

Mark and I kick off another year of reviews at SFFWorld with two Science Fiction novels.  Mark looks at a classic while I look at a brand-spanking-new novel, both aimed at younger readers.

Strange Chemistry has been publishing some excellent novels since launching in September 2012.  While I haven't read every book published under the imprint under the deft guidance of Amanda Rutter, the books I have read have worked extremely well for me.  Such is the case with Amalie Howard's The Almost Girl (which the more the title rolls around in my head, the more it sounds like an episode of Doctor Who), the first of a duology.

In The Almost Girl, Howard never lets the plot or her characters settle into a rut. Something is always pulling the narrative forward with urgency, whether an action scene when Riven is battling the zombie-cyborg Vectors, or if she examining her feelings about Caden. The parallel worlds, zombie-soldiers, genetic manipulation gave a great science fictional feel to the world of Neopses. It isn’t clear just how similar our world is to Neopses, but it seems like either a future version of our world or perhaps a world like ours with a divergent point in its past. Regardless, the two worlds contrast each other effectively.

Howard’s characterization of Riven as a hardened soldier came across well, and even more so, the emotions she struggled with about her sister Shae. As the novel deals with two parallel worlds, Howard cleanly divides the novel between the two, with the first half taking place on Earth and the second half taking place mostly on Neopses. In some ways, the locales of Neopses where the action takes places had the feel of a mash-up between The Cursed Earth (of Judge Dredd fame) and Coruscant (of Star Wars) that may have lost some of its lustre. Neopses seems to be a world, as we learn through some of its inhabitants, that is trying to cling to any of its lost greatness.

Mark continues his re-read of the Heinlein classics reissued in the Virginia Edition with The Rolling Stones:

Reading Heinlein’s books in (mainly) chronological order for the first time, I am now picking up more of Heinlein’s evolution as a writer. At this point he has become more confident and has begun to develop and reinforce what many would consider ‘the Heinlein voice’. His dialogue has become lively and energetic. His characters have now started to settle into what would become a Heinlein archetype – bright and intelligent, which at times shows that ‘hectoring and lecturing’ that would be apparent in his later work.

The Rolling Stones is a story like Between Planets that takes place on a wider canvas – this time, it’s Luna, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, around Saturn – but whereas previous tales have focused around one key character, this time the plot is predominantly about a family.

...

For all my gripes, we have here characters that Heinlein will keep returning to in the future. He has used similar archetypes in the past, too – the family of Jim Marlow on Red Planet isn’t that different – but here, the templates are given full rein.

Books in the Mail (W/E 2013-04-06)

A few physical books, an electronic arc comprise this week’s batch of arrivals.


Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution, and Revolution edited by Victoria Blake Trade Paperback 02/26/2013) – Underland Press is a relatively new small press, but they’ve got an impressive stable of authors, including Elizabeth Hand, Matthew Hughes, and Jeff VanderMeer. Blake is also the publisher at Underland..

Before email, before “the web,” before hackers and GPS and sexting, before titanium implants, before Google Goggles, before Siri, and before each and every one of us carried a computer in our pockets, there was cyberpunk, and science fiction was never the same.

Cyberpunk writers—serious, smart, and courageous in the face of change—exposed the naiveté of a society rushing headlong into technological unknowns. Technology could not save us, they argued, and it might in fact ruin us. Now, thirty years after The Movement party-crashed the science fiction scene, the cyberpunk reality has largely come to be. The future they imagined is here.

In this book, you’ll find stories by legendary cyberpunk authors like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, as well as stories by new cyberpunk voices like Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Lethem. You’ll find stories about society gone wrong and society saved, about soulless humans and soulful machines, about futures worth fighting for and futures that do nothing but kill.

Welcome to your cyberpunk world.


Without a Summer by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor;Hardcover 04/02/2013) – Third in Kowal’s series of novels that seem to fit squarely in the Fantasy of Manners subset of books.

Up-and-coming fantasist Mary Robinette Kowal enchanted fans with award-winning short stories and beloved novels featuring Regency pair Jane and Vincent Ellsworth. In Without a Summer the master glamourists return home, but in a world where magic is real, nothing—even the domestic sphere—is quite what it seems.

Jane and Vincent go to Long Parkmeade to spend time with Jane’s family, but quickly turn restless. The year is unseasonably cold. No one wants to be outside and Mr. Ellsworth is concerned by the harvest, since a bad one may imperil Melody’s dowry. And Melody has concerns of her own, given the inadequate selection of eligible bachelors. When Jane and Vincent receive a commission from a prominent family in London, they decide to take it, and take Melody with them. They hope the change of scenery will do her good and her marriage prospects—and mood—will be brighter in London.
Once there, talk is of nothing but the crop failures caused by the cold and increased unemployment of the coldmongers, which have provoked riots in several cities to the north. With each passing day, it’s more difficult to avoid getting embroiled in the intrigue, none of which really helps Melody’s chances for romance. It’s not long before Jane and Vincent realize that in addition to getting Melody to the church on time, they must take on one small task: solving a crisis of international proportions.


Stepping Stone / Love Machine: Two Short Novels from Crosstown to Oblivion by Walter Mosley (Tor;Hardcover 04/02/2013) This is the third ‘double’ book this year from Mosley/Tor, it seems to work well.

Stepping Stone: Truman Pope has spent his whole life watching the world go by. A gentle, unassuming soul, he has worked in the mailroom of a large corporation for decades without making waves, until the day he spots a mysterious woman in yellow. A woman nobody else can see. Soon Truman's quiet life begins to turn upside-down.

Love Machine: The brainchild of an eccentric, possibly deranged scientist, the "Love Machine" can merge individual psyches and memories into a collective Co-Mind. Tricked into joining the Co-Mind, as part of a master plan to take over the world, Lois Kim struggles to adapt to her new reality and abilities. Is there any way back to the life that was stolen from her, or is she destined to lead humanity into a strange new era??



The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig (Angry Robot Books Mass Market Paperback 05/28/2013) – Chuck is an author whose fiction I really need to read. I’ve been following him on twitter since I joined and his blog where he dispenses some smart, smart writing advice. The guy works it to the nth degree. What better place to start than a novel with a protagonist named Mookie.

Meet Mookie Pearl.
Criminal underworld? He runs in it.

Supernatural underworld? He hunts in it.

Nothing stops Mookie when he's on the job.

But when his daughter takes up arms and opposes him, something's gotta give...

File Under: Urban Fantasy [ Family Matters | When Underworlds Collide | Thrill of the Hunt | Chips and Old Blocks ]


The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey (Putnam Juvenile Hardcover 05/07/2013) – Alien apocalypse for the younger set, looks mildly intriguing from a very popular author. The publisher is marketing this in a big way, the book arrived in a a fancy custom envelope.

Overview
The Passage meets Ender's Game in an epic new series from award-winning author Rick Yancey.

After the 1st wave, only darkness remains. After the 2nd, only the lucky escape. And after the 3rd, only the unlucky survive. After the 4th wave, only one rule applies: trust no one.

Now, it's the dawn of the 5th wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie's only hope for rescuing her brother—or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up..

Katya's World, Martian War & The Dead of Winter at SFFWorld

Going on two weeks in a row, here are three reviews from the same gang as last week …


Jonathan L. Howard has published a few adult fantasy novels and now with Katya’s World
he launches a new young adult series for the fine folks at Strange Chemistry:

Jonathan L. Howard’s Katya’s World tells the story of the human colony world Russalka; a world whose surface is primarily water. As such, much of the action takes place on a submarine and focuses on Katya Kuriakova, a young cadet in the navy. Evoking the juvenile novels of Robert A. Heinlein and the claustrophobic atmosphere of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, it has been suggested that Howard is starting a submarine-punk trend with Katya’s World. Be that as it may, and whatever one wishes to label the novel, Howard has given readers a fun, engaging novel that is the tip of an iceberg of a series.

Katya is a smart young girl whose sense of loss and detachment is cloud that covers her character, but pleasingly, this element of her character is just one fraction. From her interactions with her uncle to the even more engaging discussions she has with Kane, Katya is bright young girl. She’s headstrong but Howard smartly keeps her on the positive side of too plucky. Her smarts are evident in her actions and it becomes clear her promotion at the beginning of the novel is justified.

Mark takes a look at another mash-up from sorts from Kevin J. Anderson. This time, Anderson’s The Martian War recasts H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds:

Kevin’s version combines fiction with ‘real’ people. Not only is the author HG Wells a key character, but the evolutionist and scientist Professor TH Huxley, who, as a mentor of Wells, introduces HG to a covert symposium of like-minded scientists, working for the British government against an impending war versus Germany. The sudden arrival of Doctor Moreau (see Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau) raises their awareness to a possible invasion from Mars. Moreau has been working for astronomer Percival Lowell in the Sahara Desert recreating the Martian canals to let the Martians know of intelligent life on Earth. Lowell doesn’t realise that letting others know of human intelligence can make the humans a threat rather than an ally, something Lowell comes to regret...

As before, with Nemo, one of the great fun things about such a novel is the way it combines real people with fictional characters. Here, as well as TH Huxley, astronomer Percival Lowell, and Giovanni Schiaparelli, (the original cartographer of the ‘canals’ on Mars), we have the fictional Dr. Moreau, Hawley Griffin (from The Invisible Man) and Selwyn Cavor (from The First Men in the Moon) amongst others. It is great fun spotting the references, some subtle, others less so. Even ol’ Jules Verne gets a mention.

Nila reviews The Dead of Winter, the first in a vampire/western hybrid from Lee Collins

The Dead of Winter is about Cora Oglesby; spook hunter, devoted wife, drunk, and faithful minion of a Christian God. She’s also a damn good shot. She and her husband, Ben Oglesby, arrive in Leadville, Colorado in the dead of winter (imagine that) after the local sheriff and his deputy run across something that just don’t sit right in their minds.

In the forest around town, something took down two wolf hunters, making a bloody mess without leaving a trace of the bodies. After negotiating terms with Cora and Ben, the sheriff hands over responsibility to the spook hunters and off they go into the woods to catch their monster..

…

The Dead of Winter is an interesting and entertaining story about a hard and flawed woman who must face her own sins to beat her arch-enemy. A well written story, with good pacing, the story is told in the third person. The novel is written primarily from Cora’s point of view, but the author takes occasional forays into other characters’ heads in a fashion that can be a bit disconcerting. Though Mr. Collins maintains the point of view shifts more steadily in the second half of the book, he does a bit of jumping during the first part. Just bear with it, Mr. Collins eventually settles the ride for you (sorry, it’s a western, I can’t seem to shake the vernacular).

Strange Launch & Full Dark - Two New Reviews

Two launch titles in this week’s post. One launch title is the debut from a very promising writer whose book launches an imprint and the other book is from an established author who launched a new on-going supernatural mystery series

Strange Chemistry is the new Young Adult imprint from the fine folks at Angry Robot Books and they’ve (SMARTLY) decided to launch the imprint with Gwenda Bond’s engaging debut novel, Blackwood:

The disappearance of the Roanoke Colony of North Carolina is one of the great American mysteries and one of the largest documented disappearances in the history of the world. 116 people in total disappeared and many theories have tried to account for these missing people. In Gwenda Bond’s debut novel Blackwood she takes the historical fact of the disappearance, fills in with some more history, and adds some conjecture of dark magic to the disappearance. All of that is in the background for most of the novel and instead Ms. Bond focuses her novel on Miranda Blackwood, a young lady who works for the local theater and cares for her drunk father, her mother having passed away long before the novel begins. Phillips* Rawlings, an equally distraught young man who was sent off the island after being caught in a mischievous act, plays as central a role, is the police chief’s song who happens to hear strange voices.
… 

Once Phillips gets back to Roanoke, it is left to he and Miranda to solve the mystery of the missing people. Along the way, spirits inhabit bodies, people seemingly return to life, ancient weapons of magic are discovered, and a few red herrings crop up to keep the plot moving. Adding to the tension is the (somewhat obvious) romantic subplot between Phillips and Miranda. Bond plays their budding romance pretty well, thought at times it felt a bit rushed but that’s likely due to the briskly paced narrative.

Mark’s review concerns Christopher Fowler’s first Bryant and May Mystery Full Dark House a mystery/supernatural story hybrid :

It’s a witty, clever little book, written with panache and humour, whilst using Christopher’s horror origins to throw in the odd little shock as we veer slightly into Twilight Zone or X-Files territory. The characters are great (although a little rude in places, so they might shock your typical crime fan) and the setting, both in the past and the present, wholly immersive. The suspects all appear as identifiable as in a game of Cluedo or an Agatha Christie novel, and it’s great fun trying to work out whodunnit. The details of their first case together for the Peculiar Crimes Squad, set in 1940’s Blitz-hit London are wonderfully well written. As richly detailed as Connie Willis’s recent Blackout/All Clear, there’s a palpable sense of being in the city whilst there’s rationing and a war on. With none of the technical gubbins of today’s detectives, Bryant and May have to use good, old-fashioned deduction to make their conclusions work. A knowledge of Ancient Greek mythology is quite useful here. That, and a little understanding of the occult that wouldn’t go amiss from a pulp-fiction 1930’s tale.
…
I’m sure some readers will be struck by how such tales have recently struck a popular chord. Treading similar ground (or is that a policeman’s beat?) to Ben Aaronovitch’s recent Rivers of London/Peter Grant novels, I must say that as much as I enjoyed Ben’s first novel, I enjoyed this one much, much more. Full Dark House is a more subtle tale, cleverer in its plot twists, sexier and more stylish, although less genre related, perhaps.