Hello Interwebs!
It's the most wonderful time of the year! Summerween is here! For all of you who don't know or are new here this is a horror/Halloween themed readathon put on by GabbyReads and OliviaReadsALatte on a combination of YouTube, Instagram, and their respective Patreon. This readathon lasts from July 15th to July 21st and there's five prompts to fulfill.
1. Read a book in the dark or at night
2. Read book with Halloween colors on the cover (any colors you associate with Halloween)
3. Read a book with "haunt" in the title
4. Read a slasher
5. Make or bake a treat to go with your spooky reads
So with that in mind I bought the merch and was ready for the readathon with my TBR ready and waiting. I finished my current read early on Friday morning at work and started my first book before I went home to sleep for a couple hours.
So we have my Summerween tank top (I also have a t-shirt version) and the special Summerween ghost print book sleeve with the little ghosties which is the Maxi size from
HappyGoLovelySleeves. I love it so so so much. It's big enough that I can fit a full size hardcover in the main pocket as well as my kindle in the front pocket and there's even a pocket for a pen. They also make little page corner keeper bookmarks and coffee cozies so check them out.
Next my TBR. I have three books picked for the readathon.
- Three Miles Past by Stephen Graham Jones: this is a short story collection by my favorite horror author that I got for Christmas and haven't read yet. I think this cover is perfectly Halloween colored and I'm excited for this.
- The Haunting of Gillespie House by Darcy Coates: this is my pick for a book with "haunt" in the title. I read my first Darcy Coates book, The Haunting of Ashburn House, in May for a book club and I loved it. Her books seem to be kind of cozy horror and it was a lot of fun.
- Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare (Clown in a Cornfield #1): this is my pick for a slasher. This is a young adult horror that's been out for a while and has a sequel coming out soon. I've had the eBook for a while now and got a copy of the hardcover from Pango a couple months ago. This is probably the one I'm most excited about. I recently found him on TikTok and he's so funny and entertaining and has such good book recommendations.
Alright so I ended up being busy on the first day of Summerween so I missed the watch-along of IT on Gabby and Olivia's patreon but I did start Clown in a Cornfield on Friday and got about halfway into it. This morning I had absolutely nothing to do so I continued to read on it and I joined in on Gabby's patreon reading sprints when they started at noon. And I finished it. And I loved it. I'll insert a pic of the book here and then maybe some spoilers in my review afterwards. I'll insert another image to indicate the end of my review.
So Clown in a Cornfield follows a teenage girl named Quinn Maybrook who is a senior in high school and has just moved to Kettle Springs, Missouri from Philadelphia with her doctor father following the overdose death of her mother. This is a sleepy farm community surrounded by cornfields with a defunct corn syrup factory which has been closed for quite a while before being torched recently. Overlooking the entire town is the town mascot, a clown called Frendo. Their first night they have dinner in the diner in town and although their waitress and the town sheriff are perfectly polite the rest of the diner's patrons seem downright hostile to Quinn. At her first day of school she immediately falls in with the "bad kids" and befriends the group of four: Cole, Janet, Matt, and Ronnie as well as her neighbor, Rust. She attends one day of school and then the Founders Day festival the next day which is interrupted by fireworks which prompts the sheriff to threaten Cole, despite him not being involved. Quinn is invited to the big party out at a local barn that night and decides to go. After the shenanigans at the festival there is an ominous gathering of the town improvement council during which the sheriff dismisses the mayor and deputizes the townsfolk to "teach them a lesson". Upon leaving the meeting the mayor is murdered by someone dressed as Frendo. As the party looms we also are privy to the murder of one of Cole's friends, Tucker, by someone also dressed as Frendo and the abduction of Quinn's father during the early part of the party.
The party at the barn starts with Cole, Quinn and Janet hitting a clown in the middle of the road which turns out to be a scarecrow placed there as a prank by Matt and Ronnie who dress as Frendo for the party. The party starts typically enough: teens smoking/vaping in the empty silo, drinking, dancing, and enjoying themselves. Then a girl Quinn met on the first day when she helped her open her new locker, Ginger, stumbles into view with a crossbow bolt in the back. As Quinn and Janet try to get her up and away, they spot someone dressed as Frendo, complete with a mask, armed with a crossbow emerge from the cornfields and start firing, killing Ginger. Many are injured, including Janet, but Quinn gets her into the cornfields where they meet up with Rust, the stereotypical farm boy with a gun rack in his truck. Cole has been grabbed by Matt and Ronnie in the meantime and are barricaded in the silo while the clown with the crossbow massacres their classmates.
Rust helps Quinn get the crossbow bolt out of Janet and stem the bleeding before giving her a handgun to keep herself safer and they move on with the shotgun and rifle. As they approach the farm they realize that the barn has been set on fire with the back doors locked and the crossbow wielding clown at the front doors to pick off survivors. Rust gets the doors open with the shotgun and when the clown comes around the barn, Quinn kills him with the rifle. They unmask him realizing that it's the science teacher from the high school. Back where she'd been left, Janet overhears some adults talking and realizes that there's more than one "Frendo" and they're moving towards the barn as well. She follows them to warn the others and emerges at the barn in time to give them a warning before she's murdered by another clown, this one with a circular saw.
Rust and Quinn fight back and end up being let into the silo by Cole and when they're attacked by more clowns, one with an axe, they find a box of dynamite left over from farm work. The other four go through old workings of the silo crawling up the defunct conveyor belt while Rust stays behind to light the fuse. They are out the other side when they hear the explosion and realize that he's probably dead.
The four are picked up by the sheriff who puts Cole in the back of the squad car. While the sheriff is talking to the other three Cole realizes that he's bleeding from the shoulder, where one of the clowns was shot by a shotgun, and barely manages to warn the others that he's one of them before the sheriff knocks out Quinn who is given to Matt and Ronnie who are revealed to be part of the plot.
While Cole is taken to the defunct corn syrup factory which his father owned and he accidentally torched, the sheriff reveals that the idea is to cleanse the town of these disrespectful teenagers and pin it on Cole who will be hanged in an attempt to make it look like a suicide at the factory.
Meanwhile Quinn injures the other two and gets away running for the empty farmhouse, finding one of the Frendo's on the couch burnt and dead from injuries sustained in the explosion of the silo. She manages to kill Ronnie with a cleaver from the kitchen and get the rifle back. She also finds keys to the truck adn manages to drive it enough to kill Matt, crushing him between the truck and his own car before taking his car and heading for the factory.
At the factory she manages to make enough of a commotion to make Cole's hanging slow enough to not kill him immediately and she is in true danger when a truck bursts in with Rust at the wheel. He'd been knocked unconscious by the explosion but hadn't died. They manage to deal with the three "Frendo" clowns in the factory and save Cole before another appears from the bowels of the factory, revealed to be Quinn's father who had been kidnapped to provide medical care to one of the clowns.
The wrap-up finds that the clowns were "old school" members of the community who hated the kids there and blamed a lot of misfortune on them, especially Cole who had become a troublemaker following his mom's death from cancer as a kid and was blamed for all that as well as his sister's death in a tragic accident at a party and the fire at the factory, both of which were mostly accidental although slightly negligent. You find out that in addition to the sheriff, the science teacher, Matt, and Ronnie that a lot of other adults were involved including the waitress from the diner, Janet's stepfather, and Cole's father who blamed him for his little sister's death. Their story ends with Quinn's dad deciding to stop practicing medicine and running for mayor, Rust and Cole dating (which was unexpectedly adorable) and friends with Quinn, all of whom are still in the town. The epilogue has Cole's father, who survived the factory, escaping to Cuba and plotting the completion of his mission which is revenge on his son.
So spoilers over but this book was so incredibly fun and creepy and such a fast read. I gave this a 5 star rating and I am definitely going to be preordering the sequel that comes out in August. This was the perfect summer slasher read and I really did love it. I highly recommend this book and am really excited for book 2 as well as Dead Mall which he just announced today as a comic book from Dark Horse Comics that will come out October 26th. Also follow the man on TikTok because he is totally and completely the best.
So that's all I have for the first two days of Summerween. I'm not sure what book I'm going to start now but I have high hopes since we started out so well.
Happy Summerween!
Richelle
