Killer clowns and kiddie cults and cornfields, oh my.
Adam Cesare's Clown in a Cornfield & Children of the Corn.
Hi, friends,
So, clowns don’t bother me as much as they bother some people.
I mean… don’t get me wrong, I don’t generally, like, SEEK THEM OUT.
But they don’t make me run screaming.
Cornfields, though. Being lost in a cornfield, that would do it.
Being lost in a cornfield and knowing that that someone or something was hunting me… that would double-do it.
And being hunted by a clown… yeah, no thank you.
Reading: Clown in a Cornfield, by Adam Cesare
When my copy of this book came in via interlibrary loan, my co-worker happened to be the one who processed it—and she found the cover art so disturbing that she put it at the bottom of a pile of other books so that she wouldn’t have to look at it.
So just imagine how she’d react if she moved to a new town and discovered that this was the view out of her bedroom window:
There, painted on the side of the factory, was a clown.
An old-timey clown with a porkpie hat and red, bulbous nose. The clown had faded greasepaint stubble on his chin, and his once ruby-red nose was pocked with blisters from where the paint had bubbled. His painted white face had long gone gray. But his eyes had been more or less untouched by the flames, and something in the way they’d been painted made it seem like the clown was staring straight into her window, straight at Quinn.
So, while the cover art of Clown in a Cornfield evokes old school Stephen King and Clive Barker—who blurbed it—the inside, to me, was more reminiscent of 80s slasher movies mashed up with Christopher Pike, in that most of the secondary characters talked and acted like boozy 40-somethings on Dynasty:
“Give me that,” Janet said, swiping a beer from a terrified looking first-year. “We can’t be drinking on camera, dickhead.” She drained the half beer and tossed the empty can over her shoulder. The boy watched, something like admiration—infatuation?—creeping onto his face.
All of which is entirely my jam.
It features an inversion of the age dynamics in Children of the Corn—in this story, adults have decided that teenagers are The Problem—but it subs in the economy for religion. It’s a story about the generational divide taken to the extreme, and it’s about how rhetoric that dehumanizes and scapegoats a specific demographic makes it very, very easy for people to justify doing violence to that group.
And not just justify the violence, but take pride in it. Encourage it. Revel in it.
Given the endless onslaught of headlines blaming every generation from the Millennials on down for every problem under the sun, and the fact that the aggressors literally use the slogan Make Kettle Springs Great Again… it all feels prettyyy relevant, is what I’m saying.
Added to the TBR:
The Last Beautiful Girl, by Nina Laurin
White Smoke, by Tiffany D. Jackson
Paola Santiago and the River of Tears, by Tehlor Kay Mejia
Watching: Children of the Corn (Fritz Kiersch, 1984)
I’ve been mostly trying to stick to new watches this Spooky Season, but it had been so long since I’d seen this one and after reading Clown in a Cornfield, it just felt like it was meant to be. If you’re not familiar, it’s based on the Stephen King story of the same name from the collection Night Shift, and is about a rural town in which the kids kill all of the adults in town and start a religious cult that worship a monster in the cornfield that they call He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
And I’d forgotten that there was a sequence towards the end where the corn LITERALLY attacks Peter Horton? Which was pretty awkward. But not as awkward as the amazing 1984 CGI, which, thankfully, was kept to a minimum.
Also awkward: When Linda Hamilton serenades Peter Horton with a birthday song at the beginning of the movie. And when Peter Horton runs someone over because he’s not watching the road while he’s driving, and then once they get going again, CONTINUES TO NOT WATCH THE ROAD??
Speaking of Linda Hamilton, she has VERY little to do here, so I guess it’s a good thing that Terminator also came out in 1984? (She spends most of the runtime of this movie being like HEY PETER HORTON IT’S PROBABLY A BAD IDEA TO GO TO THIS TOWN and HEY PETER HORTON MAYBE DON’T JUST WANDER INTO RANDOM HOUSES and he never listens, sigh.)
Random trivia: The actor who played Isaac—the creep in the hat pictured above—ALSO PLAYED COUSIN IT in the Addams Family movies??? He was also in Tammy and the T-Rex, but I don’t remember him in it, so now I have an excuse to revisit that one. Courtney Gains, who played Malachai, was in Back to the Future AND The ‘Burbs?? Neither of which I’ve seen in ages.
More reading: Children of the Corn, by Stephen King
Well, of COURSE I had to re-read it, right? I don’t think I’ve picked Night Shift up since middle school.
And HOLY COW, the short story is SO. DIFFERENT.
As in the movie: kids, murder, cult.
Different from the movie: Little narrator kid and his psychic sister don’t exist. The murders took place over a decade ago, and the kids have been running things in Gatlin ever since. The Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton characters are married, and they HAAAAATE each other—or, at least, Burt hates Vicky.
Some of the dynamic is similar—Burt never listens to Vicky in both versions, but in this case it’s largely out of anger and meanness and spite, whereas in the movie it was more out of non-malicious toolishness.
It has a true horror ending, versus the happy ending in the movie.
Basically, it is 29 pages of Big Yikes. In a good way.
…and now I want to revisit more Stephen King short stories, heh.
What do you think? Should I go for an early Stephen King short story collection, or something of his that I’ve never read? Any recommendations?
Talk to you soon,
Leila
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (but it's not scary).