Author Adam Cesare has made a point of narratively challenging himself with each new chapter in his Clown in a Cornfield young adult slasher series, and those challenges keep paying off.
Though its roots will always lie in the story of a masked killer in a clown costume slaughtering people in brutal ways, Cesare’s three previous books in the series each reached for different subgenres, giving the author a chance to play with conspiracy thrillers, folk horror, and more while still playing with the slasher elements that made the first book and its subsequent film adaptation such a hit.
Which is why, at first glance, the fourth Clown book, Lights! Camera! Frendo!, might seem like a little bit of a step backwards. Trust me when I tell you it’s an illusion.
By stepping back to where it all started with the story of an in-universe movie adaptation, Cesare’s not only able to look at his own series in a new way, but push his instincts for classic slasher storytelling in new directions, creating a book that’s both a blast to read and a reflective trip down memory lane for longtime readers.
With Quinn Maybrook dead (or is she?) after the events of the third book, the new film shifts the action to a new final girl, the one playing Quinn Maybrook in the first movie based on the Kettle Springs Massacre. Sabrina Alvarez is a nobody, an actor plucked from obscurity to play Quinn alongside a cast of other, more established young actors in supporting roles. When we meet her, she’s still learning the ropes, trying to build up her toughness with the goal of pleasing big-shot director David Frank Hansen, and earning the respect of her co-stars.
To make things even more intimidating, the cast and crew have descended on the real Kettle Springs for on-location shooting, where survivors of the original massacre and its brutal aftermath still remember exactly what happened. Characters like Rust Vance, Cole Hill, and Jerri Shaw, all major players in previous books, are hanging around the production with their own roles to play off-screen, which means that Sabrina really has to get it right if she wants to please everyone.
But of course, you can’t please everybody, especially whoever’s trying to sabotage the movie, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake.
One of the great strengths of the Clown sequels thus far has been Cesare’s ability to deliver the slasher goods while also reaching outside of the comfort of the formula to try new things. Lights! Camera! Frendo! is, conceptually at least, a creative obstacle in that path. How do you do something new when you’re literally taking your readers and your characters back to the story that started it all, as the cast and crew of the new film, including Cole as a producer and Jerri hanging around the shoot, try to restage the life-changing slaughter that forms the basis for the movie? How does talking about all the deaths from the original book, then dramatizing them, make for a sense of newness?
Cesare finds a way, and that way is paved with his own reflections on exactly where the story’s gone so far and what that means. This is a writer who just watched a film adaptation of his own story, with all the compromises and tweaks and new directions that entails, reflecting on who exactly gets to tell this story and why.
Is it the actor who wants to do the lead role justice, the survivors who want to try to rebuild their lives while honoring what happened before, the writer who’s constantly reshaping his own creation? The book never veers all the way into metafiction, nor does it pivot to Hollywood satire, but with wit and wisdom, Cesare explores all the juicy nooks and crannies of these questions, while delivering another runaway train of a slasher story.
I’m a little bit of a mark for these books, I’ll admit, in part because Cesare’s knowledge of the slasher genre is vast and nuanced. He’s the kind of writer who could fire off a new slasher story based on the tried and true formulas in a heartbeat, and that kind of comfort in the space lets him push further, break the formula apart, turn it around so we can look at it from new sides.
The kills in Lights! Camera! Frendo! reflect this, as Cesare plays with our expectations to create new, brutal ways for his characters to die, while infusing each new death with meaning, ratcheting up the tension, until the third act explodes in tense uncertainty. As a fellow slasher devotee, it kept me guessing, and that’s saying something.
If you’ve followed the Clown in a Cornfield saga up to now, you probably don’t need me to convince you that you should pick up the next installment, but that doesn’t change how much fun it is. Lights! Camera! Frendo! both fits right into the larger series and pushes its boundaries with a jolt of fresh creativity that hits like a knife in the dark. It’s a blast.
Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available wherever books are sold as of today, August 18.
