Clown in a Cornfield
Adam Cesare (2009)
Image withheld under the book is read.
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
This was a book club pick, and not one that I would've chosen. The cover itself was a turnoff despite not judging books by one. I'm not into horror, and I had a feeling that this young adult horor would "Friday the 13th" everyone. Yeah, pretty much.
Quinn and her dad Glenn move halfway across the country from Philadelphia to an old house in a small town. Glenn is a doctor who has seen too much death, including that of his wife, who'd become addicted to painkillers. They move into the house of the town's former doctor, who left rather abruptly. From Quinn's bedroom (the attic), which runs the length of the house, she can see a factory in the distance with an eery looking clown. She'll learn that it's Frendo, the town mascot. The original factory owner doodled a clown with a hat and put it on the label of whatever it was that he sold. Yeah, I forgot already because it wasn't actually important to the story.
The prologue of the story, which was a year earlier, was a bunch of kids live streaming stunts and practical jokes. They're at the town reservoir. Unfortunately, the younger sister of another main character (Cole) who is too young for these parties decides to climb on the "stacks" and dive in. She hits her head on the way down and dies. Cole jumps in to rescue her, but it's too late.
When we next meet this crew, Janet is still making videos but Cole quit because of an incident that happened off screen a week before in which he accidentally set fire to his Dad's factory. His father had closed the factory the year before and now the town was suffering a bit. Quinn learns all this when she's suspended on her first day of class along with the gang that can't shoot videos straight. Quinn winds up going with Cole to a big school party.
At the Founders Day Parade, a prank that Tucker (Cole's "bodyguard") participates in causes some damages to the floats and a few minor injuries, plus an M-80 goes off scaring people. The sherrif grabs Cole and wants to know what he did and lets him know that the town is down with their hijinks.
There's an emergency town meeting called, after which the murders start, all at the hands of someone dressed in a Frendo costume. They start with knives slitting throats and stabbing guts, but then switch to crossbows. Every kid at the barn seems to be a target, Janet in particular. Quinn and Cole seemed to be spared but not by any plot armor, but by the plot itself.
I'll go ahead and spoil this because it was stupid. Basically, half of the town is down with "culling" the latest crop of high school students, but in this case, they plan to pin it all on the new girl and Cole, for whom a suicide note was written, along with Rust who is supposed to make the third part of a love triangle. Janet's stepfather has absolutely no qualms about the girl dying at all. And then Cole's father shows up. He blames Cole for everything including the death of his daughter, which makes his okay with murdering his own son. Wut?
Rust turns out not to be dead, shows up, saves Cole, who's dangling by his neck at this point. Quinn manages to shoot the sherrif who'd been planning this for a long time, even longer than the previous week's fire, saying how you can persuade people over time that killing their children is the correct thing to do.
I'm not exactly sure how many students go to that high school or how many of them were at that party or how many might've escaped. However, for the plan to have actually played out, those survivors would all have to be hunted down so that the actual story couldn't get out.
I kept waiting for some screwball revelation, like the dead daughter actually being the sherrif's love child or something, giving him a stake in all this. Or Quinn with a rifle confronting her father who was there and dressed in a clown outfit (he dressed like that to escape the prison he was in, where he found the rat-infested body of the former doctor). Instead, the only curve was after Rust saves Cole, the two embrace and start making out. This was not telegraphed anywhere in the story, so it was almost comedic when it happened. They used to be friends (one rich, one poor) until one started playing football and the other wasn't athletic enough. That's their entire story. There was more to suggest that Tucker was "gay" for Cole, who wasn't interested, except that Tucker had mentioned how he enjoyed his hooking up with Janet. So not so much a surprising twist as a head-scratcher.
Finally, the father, who had been double-crossed by the sherrif, who tries to kill him at the end, doesn't have any revelations or changes of heart. He still wants Cole and the rest of the kids dead. And rather than crawling off and dying in a field somewhere, we learn that he was escaped and will return at some point. (There's a sequel.) Meanwhile, Cole is rich with access to all his father's money, even though no body has been found and no one can be certain that he's actually dead.
So much to complain about with this book. But I'm done complaining. On to some other Halloween books -- there are a few cozy mysteries set around Halloween.
