A review by librarymouse
Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

dark funny mysterious fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

As I told my roommate, while halfway through the book, "the real bad guy we found along the way is Trump 2020."
Published in 2020, Clown in a Cornfield is what must have felt at the time an extreme, worst case scenario version of what was playing out at the time during Trump's first term and second campaign cycle. Unfortunately, reading this in 2025, it feels almost realistic. There's a pretty massive generational divide, culturally, especially in rural areas. The political divide that comes up between generations seems to be becoming quite the gulf in a lot of places, and this book explores the extremism of that in a bloody, often anachronistically funny way.

I think it was a really unique take by Cesare to have a slasher feature the nearly teens of the generation that grew up with regular school shootings and lockdowns -
especially so as the killer clowns are the town's adults acting to kill the children they've deemed to be a "blighted crop." The kids have more lockdown and emergency procedure training than any civilian should need to, and that, mixed with Rust's safe gun use practice and discipline means that they're a better trained counter-strike team than any of the people trying to kill them could have expected. Janet's death was horrifying, especially knowing that she maybe could have lived had she not saved her friends, and that her stepfather was one of the people doing the killing.

I'm so glad Rust survived, and I really enjoyed how the expected love triangle between Cole, Quinn, and Rust was circumvented. I love rural queerness so much, as a rural queer person.
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