Brooke Nelson

Yes, this is a book review.

Yes, the title will make sense in time.

It’s been so long since I’ve written a blog post here. I’m not exactly sure what happened. I just sort of lost my enthusiasm and let myself slip away from my weekly posts. Soon enough, I figured it didn’t much matter if I posted at all.

I obviously changed my mind on the issue, seeing as I’m here now, and I hope to give my blog a little jumpstart and get going with it once again. I’ve had so much fun with this blog and every one of my readers ever since the day I started it. A couple months down the road, I had an even more amazing experience when I shared my debut novel, The Half Theft, with you. The amount of support I received from my fellow readers was unbelievable and so heartwarming.

To put it simply, I missed you all, so I’m back.

I’ve been up to a lot since I disappeared, including co-hosting my podcast, We Talk Books, which leads me into today’s post.

I picked up a copy of Clown in a Cornfield (by Adam Cesare) from my local library last week in hopes of reading it for the podcast. After the prologue, I had a feeling my sister (aka my podcast co-host) wouldn’t have very much fun reading it. It’s a bit too gory and modern-teen-centered for her taste. I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but continue.

Just to be clear, at the end of the book, the author specifically asks for people to review his work, whether or not they enjoyed it. I appreciate that, and I give him a lot of credit for putting himself out there in that way. I normally shy away from negative reviews, but with the combination of that and so many other things, I simply had to write a review.

For starters, I can honestly say I’ve never read a book that uses “GTFO” in an unironic and non-texting sense. That wasn’t the only instance of odd texting abbreviations in the story, but it certainly was the one that made me laugh the hardest. I cannot stress this enough: people don’t actually say the letters G-T-F-O in real life. That part I could live with. It was goofy, but it didn’t ruin the story.

What did bother me was the fact that the entire mysterious part of the story can be inferred from the synopsis inside the cover. I don’t even know what to make of that, but I certainly thought it meant the revealing of the clowns would be something exciting and unexpected, not literally the exact thing it said on the inside of the book jacket.

START OF SPOILERS

Now, this is one instance where I truly wished I had read reviews before jumping into the story. It turns out that the whole book is a political metaphor for the Cesare’s view of Trump supporters… except it’s not really a metaphor at all. It literally says the killers are Trump supporters who want to exterminate a whole generation of kids because they have smartphones and cause trouble or something like that? At the very least, I was hoping for something a bit supernatural or at least more complex.

END OF SPOILERS

To top it all off, Clown in a Cornfield has an oddly Riverdale-ish feel to it, down to two of the characters being names Ronnie and Cole. A coincidence, I’m sure.

Now, on the other hand, if you like the show, I genuinely do recommend the book to you. You’d probably enjoy it. I haven’t watched it in years though, so I guess I might have just outgrown the phase of my life where I found that sort of thing enjoyable.

On to the horror aspects of the book—the parts that were meant to be scary were definitely written in a superior fashion to the rest, if you ask me. I did find parts of it spooky. I only wish there would have been more of that since it is truly where the writer excels. The multi-chapter-long action sequence at the end really wasn’t bad.

There were corny parts, such as the rant Cole went on in the back of the car in which he somehow related murderous clowns to global warming. A weird moment, for sure, but something a Riverdale character would definitely bring up. See? I told you it had the same vibes!

All in all, I can truly say this is not book for me. A one-starrer, I’m sorry to say.

I hope, through this review, I can not only deter the right people from reading the book, but also draw the right people toward it. Cesare’s writing is clearly an acquired taste.

But please remind me not to read any more Riverdale-esque political metaphors in book form. They’re not quite my thing.

Question of the Post: What are your thoughts on the genre of horror in books? Have you read any great horror books? Any you wish you could unread? (If not, what are you currently reading?)