Scan barcode
A review by booktrotting
Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare
1.0
First thing’s first, Adam Cesare seems like a lovely bloke, so I’m sad things turned out this way. I also don’t love reading horror, and read this mostly to see where I would age this for my school pupils (Y10+ I want to say), so I’m not much of an authority on slashers.
I was surprised to see this is so well reviewed. It’s super duper by the book slasher fare, from the “we’re gonna have a good life here, honey, we’ll start fresh” father to the clown masks. There were attempts to do something fresh with the tropes of the genre, but they felt clunky, heavy handed and predictable.
I thought some of the word choice was particularly bizarre, like Cesare had used a thesaurus in a clunky way. It also just spent 150 pages on exposition which seemed to immediately transition into 150 pages of relentless gore without warning. In fact, thinking back on it a lot of the plot details turn to sand and slip between my fingers. The best thing in this book is the gore, which is excellently detailed tho super explicit for a teen novel.
SPOILER: the ending, where the mass killing is framed as a “great boost to the local economy” felt icky to me also.
I was surprised to see this is so well reviewed. It’s super duper by the book slasher fare, from the “we’re gonna have a good life here, honey, we’ll start fresh” father to the clown masks. There were attempts to do something fresh with the tropes of the genre, but they felt clunky, heavy handed and predictable.
I thought some of the word choice was particularly bizarre, like Cesare had used a thesaurus in a clunky way. It also just spent 150 pages on exposition which seemed to immediately transition into 150 pages of relentless gore without warning. In fact, thinking back on it a lot of the plot details turn to sand and slip between my fingers. The best thing in this book is the gore, which is excellently detailed tho super explicit for a teen novel.
SPOILER: the ending, where the mass killing is framed as a “great boost to the local economy” felt icky to me also.