Adam Cesare already knew he’d get to write a fourth book in his award-winning Clown in a Cornfield series when the third book – The Church of Frendo – arrived in 2024. The third and fourth installments in the slasher hit, adapted into a hit film by Eli Craig last year, were a package deal with his publisher, the first time he’d had that luxury.
What he didn’t know was the direction the fourth book would take, at least until he found himself on Craig’s set in the fall of 2023, watching his characters walk off the page and into live-action for the first time.
“I think there would be a fourth book. I don’t think it would be what it is [without the movie],” Cesare told Bloody Disgusting. “It was basically standing in fake Kettle Springs outside Winnipeg and being like, ‘I should write a book about this!’ [laughs]”
The result is Lights! Camera! Frendo!, which takes the action back to Kettle Springs, Missouri, with a twist: This time, the new wave of Frendo the Clown killings is focused on a feature film production based on the crimes committed in the first book. It was a chance for Cesare to dig into his own experiences of seeing his creation come to life, but it was also a chance to go back to Kettle Springs with an entirely different lens.
“I wanted to find a way to thread the needle of not betraying that core ideology of the books, but still make it be about film production and making a movie and the ups and downs,” Cesare said. “It’s not a full satire. I have books that are like that, and I love that genre. I like poking fun at film and film thought and film people, but I don’t think this book does that. I think this book is a different kind of thing.”
With Cesare’s original Final Girl, Quinn Maybrook, out of the picture, the new book focuses instead on the young woman playing Quinn for the movie: Sabrina Alvarez, a virtual unknown handpicked to lead a potential new horror franchise. That makes her a fish out of water who offers a fresh perspective not just on the production of the movie, but on Kettle Springs itself, mirroring Quinn’s experience in the first Clown novel. It’s a side-by-side comparison that’s there by design, to play with the expectations of longtime readers.
“It maps almost exactly onto the first book,” Cesare said. “It is the exact same length. It’s down to within 100 words. I basically just looked at the structure of [Clown in a Cornfield] and was like, ‘What works here? How can we do similar things, but just at every corner when you’re almost expecting it to do one thing, it does a slightly different thing, but it still maps on?’ I’m still trying to play the game of remaking, quote-unquote, the first book, but it doesn’t match up at all. Sabrina feeds into that. It’s the guessing game. There are a lot of returning characters, and Sabrina is the Quinn of this book.”
From there, Lights! Camera! Frendo! keeps taking familiar ingredients from the first book – including returning characters Rust Vance and Cole Hill, who are still major players in the Kettle Springs community – and spinning them out in new ways, all while telling the story of a film production through the actors, the crew, even the craft service workers. In discussing inspirations for the book, which range from slashers like All The Boys Love Mandy Lane to Bud Boetticher’s Westerns, Cesare singled out Ti West’s X, with its serious approach to film production amid a slasher narrative, as a major touchstone.
“I don’t like when stories like this don’t take the craft part of it seriously enough or don’t take the minutiae of it seriously enough, which I think is where I think this has similarities with X,” Cesare said. “If I’m going to do this, I’m going to make it feel like you’re really on a set. As quick as some of that stuff goes by, there are all these other ideas in the book; I wanted those pieces to feel real.”
Lights! Camera! Frendo! and its promotional tour are Cesare’s primary focus for the next few weeks, but it’s far from the only major project on his plate. His cosmic horror creature feature Junction Row, which he co-wrote, just premiered at Fantasia Fest earlier this summer, and Clown in a Cornfield 2 is now officially headed for film production, though Cesare noted he can’t say much about it yet other than what’s already been announced.
In the book world, reprints of his earlier novels, including Zero Lives Remaining, Video Night, and more, are on the way from Union Square & Co. in the coming months. And in early 2027, the author takes on vampires with Bloodsick, a new novel that takes him away from the slasher movie world and into the world of bloodsuckers. Set in New England, the book follows what happens when a centuries-old vampire awakens from hibernation in the modern world, and the first place he visits just happens to be a party house full of teenagers.
“I wanted to play classic with it. I think that’s part of the fun is what stuff from vampire lore I leave in and what I take out, which, spoiler alert, I put a lot in,” Cesare said. “I love that kind of stuff. I love the destroying a town vampire thing. It’s just a little bit Salem’s Lot. It’s a little bit 30 Days of Night. It’s also got that body horror element and sexual element to it. It is still a YA novel, but that’s how I pitched it to my editors.”
There is no shortage of new projects for Adam Cesare fans to enjoy, but if you’ve read this far, you’re probably ready to ask one final question: What about Clown in a Cornfield 5? As with every book in the series, Cesare ends this novel with plenty of possibilities for where the narrative could go next, but in the book’s afterword, he also notes that this might be the end of Frendo the Clown…at least for a little while.
“I literally put a winky face emoji in there,” Cesare said with a chuckle. “I think we’ve been on an every two-year schedule, like clockwork. Literally every August, every two years- 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026- a Clown in a Cornfield book has come out for four cycles of that. I think if there is going to be another one, it’s going to have at least a year of space. It’s going to break the two-year cycle in order to feel different. That’s all I can say and all I want to say about that.”
Clown in a Cornfield 4: Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available wherever you get your books.
