Clown in a Cornfield

This book is an absolute blast. I'm not sure I want to get much more in depth than that. I was looking for some fun, punchy horror and I got it.

The set-up is a simple one, and fairly recognizable to anyone who has watched a horror movie, or really any movie centered around teens. Quinn Maybrook and her widowed father move from Philadelphia to a small town in the Midwest called Kettle Springs. They're looking for a fresh start, and the town needed a new doctor. Despite wanting to keep her head down, she finds herself falling in with an unusual band of rebels - as though the popular kids had gone a little rotten. When she's invited to a party out in the cornfield, Kettle Springs starts to feel pretty cool. And then a clown with a cross bow shows up.

Clown in a Cornfield is not remotely subtle. It takes a look at our country and the current zeitgeist, and puts it in microcosm. With lots of blood, whirring chainsaws, wayward teens and angry Boomers. This book is about how much we hate young people, and why we keep killing them in the kinds of movies this book was inspired by. And despite taking on all this so unapologetically, it is still so much fun. It does take its time to set up the character dynamics, and honestly I didn't mind that much, because once it gets going, it does not stop.

For horror, it's not that scary. It has gore and it has violence, but not really the kind of suspense that gets you spooked, though there is plenty of tension and some great classic horror beats. I actually found the unraveling and the revealing of the villains a bit more interesting than the perseverance of the central characters, but that's a subtle distinction. I kept turning the page, and I had a damn good time doing it.