Quinn Maybrook just wants to make it until graduation. She might not make it to morning.
Quinn and her father moved to tiny, boring Kettle Springs to find a fresh start. But ever since the Baypen Corn Syrup Factory shut down, Kettle Springs has cracked in half. On one side are the adults, who are desperate to make Kettle Springs great again, and on the other are the kids, who want to have fun, make prank videos, and get out of Kettle Springs as quick as they can.
Kettle Springs is caught in a battle between old and new, tradition and progress. It’s a fight that looks like it will destroy the town. Until Frendo, the Baypen mascot, a creepy clown in a pork-pie hat, goes homicidal and decides that the only way for Kettle Springs to grow back is to cull the rotten crop of kids who live there now.
Hey everyone, I hope you’ve been enjoying great books this week! I don’t normally read YA but last year I saw Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield making the rounds on IG (and everywhere else) and most of the posts I read were raving about it. So, I went a little bit un-goaty, and turned into a sheep, and off I trotted to the nearest bookshop and found it.
I’ll be honest, the first half of the book wasn’t so great for me. I usually enjoy set up and character establishment and all of the preamble, but I think perhaps I just wasn’t that interested in what was being presented, story-wise, so it became a drag. However, midway through, it turned. It turned!
We see the story through the eyes of Quinn, the new girl in a tiny town, in which there was a terrible incident prior to her arrival. She meets several people, most of whom are happy to befriend her almost instantly, but we’re not sure about whether or not any of them are decent people. Quinn is suspicious, and so are we.
When things start to kick off, they REALLY kick off. I don’t know if I’ve ever read so much action in horror before – once it started it just kept going and going, amping up the tension dramatically with each event. And this is also where the “slow” first half really felt worth it, because there’s a whole host of characters that by now, I knew quite well, and I was trying to figure out who was doing what.
I had some ideas about who I thought was responsible for the… no spoilers so we’ll just call it “the chaos”, but I was wrong. Never in my wildest dreams would I have guessed, but once you know it makes sense.
Overall, I’d say this is a pretty fun YA horror read that a lot of adults will enjoy. If you’d like to get your own copy or check out the author, the links you need are below:
Happy Goat Horror 
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