 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to 31 Days of Halloween. I want to give you a friendly reminder up front. We do Sunday cinemas. We're going to be doing that every single weekend, every Sunday in October. So if you want to vote on what movies we watch, all the movies that I will have up on the poll are free on Tubi. If you want to do that, hop over to the community page on my main page. I'll try to link you down there in the doobly-doo. Hop over there and vote on what movie you want to watch. But for now, let's jump into the review. Today we were talking about a book that I read last year, or maybe the year before. Can't quite remember, but that is Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesar. The reason we are talking about this one today is because the sequel, Clown in a Cornfield 2, Friendo Lives, is out and I will be reviewing that toward the end of the month. Another thing is, this first week has no theme, but next week will be Classics Week. The week three will be Indie and Small Press and then we'll go back to just various horror content on the final week. Awesomely enough, we have five weekends in this month, so we will be having five Sunday cinemas and five game nights. Anyways, on with the review. So Clown in a Cornfield follows teenagers. It is a slasher film in book format. And that is what I liked and you disliked about it. I give this one three stars. I remember it quite clearly. I remember the first, I would say the first quarter of the book being relatively boring. And that's really the problem with slash I have found you might disagree and that's fine. The slasher, the slasher build in book format, it gives you more time to flesh out the characters early on. But unfortunately, this book falls into the same traps that a lot of the movies do, which is very little character development and a whole lot of predictability. Slasher films and books tend to follow a certain formula. And if you like that kind of thing, that's great. I do, but I tend to prefer it in visual format. Even so far as to say my heart is a chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, everyone is just raving about. I thought it was another three star book. It's a setup. And it is the same setup over and over again. And that can be fine if you're a fan of that, you know, genre. With me, I'm kind of tired of it. You know, I've seen hundreds upon hundreds of slasher films and I just prefer to watch it rather than read it. It's the same way that I feel about sci-fi and fantasy. I prefer to watch those things than read it. It's just a personal preference. With this one, I also want to harp harp harp on the fact that this is gory as hell. This is violent. This is lewd and crude. It is everything you expect from a slasher film. It is YA, young adult, but only because it falls into the same tropes as, you know, it's a coming of age kind of coming of age story. Not really coming of age at all, but it is about a young adult, young adults, you know, and that's the only reason it falls into the YA category. If you're thinking, oh, YA horror isn't intense enough, it's not disturbing enough, so on and so forth. You need to pull your head out of the dirt because there's plenty of very gruesome and horrifying YA horror out there, and this is one of those books. When the action kicks off, it is very cool. I liked it a lot, but it's that first 25% and the predictability for me. There at the end, you have a whole bunch of twists. I didn't really gel with the twists why people were being killed, and it had a bit of social commentary in there that I will succinctly put, you could say this book is okay, boomer, the horror novel, but anyways. Yeah, I don't want to get into spoilers here, but that's the one thing I just, and you'll see multiple reviews that say this, where the last quarter of the book is one big eye roll, and unfortunately that was the case for me, too. I don't know if it's because I'm older, I'm not a boomer, but I don't know if it's because I'm older or what, I don't know. Maybe I'm just not down with the kids or whatever, but anyways, it made myself laugh. But when action does finally kick in, I loved the kills, I loved the first initial twist when you find out who Frendo is, and I'm trying not to give anything away. I did like that aspect, but again, it still follows the scream protocol. So there's not a whole lot new here. It is a very cool concept, murderous clown in a cornfield. How do we get here? Why is there a clown in the cornfield? Two things that you don't think go together, go together here. I have not read the sequel yet, but I will be reading it this month, and the review for that one will be at the end of it. I just wanted to make sure that I had a review up on the channel for this one, because I initially didn't, and the reasoning behind that is I like Adam Cesar. He's one of the people who, one of the three inspirations, it was Todd the Librarian, and another person I'm not going to name, because I've since had a, anyways, we're not going to get into that, but there was Adam Cesar and then Todd the Librarian, so I'm a big fan of Cesar's YouTube channel, and he was one of the people who made me want to start my own YouTube channel. So here I am, and it's really all because of him and two other people, but especially the horror content I'm here because, I mean, even he has the black t-shirt project, and I have the Stephen King Theorist. He's the one who inspired me to start my own series. So I like him. I love, absolutely love his other books. I don't think I've ever given him below four stars until now, unfortunately. The reason why I held off putting a review up is because I want this book to be successful. If nothing else, this will get more young adults or even kids reading horror, and I am all for that. Whether or not I fanboyed over it or not, I want more people to read this book. So I've held off for an entire year or more, and I even waited for, you know, two, three months before I posted my review on Goodreads when I initially read it because I wanted this book to be successful. Luckily it has been successful. There's talks of movies. It got a sequel, all that good stuff. I even read the afterward for Clown in the Cornfield 2, which is funny. I like to read the afterwards first. I know that's weird considering I don't like spoilers, but I just skim. And one of the things that Cesar said was, if you were looking at this, if you found this book and go, wow, they really made a sequel to this one, like so many people do for so many different horror movies, then you're not alone because Adam felt that same way. I thought that was funny. But anyways, have you read Clown in the Cornfield 1 or 2? Please don't spoil anything if you read 2. But let me know what you thought of it down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U. This has been another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!