Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives by Adam Cesare

It’s an all-new horror classic about what happens when the truth is the last thing we want to believe, from Bram Stoker Award–winner and master of thrills and chills, horror legend Adam Cesare.

After barely making it out of the Kettle Springs cornfields alive, Quinn’s first year away at college should be safe and easy. All she wants is to be normal again.

But instead, Quinn finds that her past won’t leave her alone when she becomes the focus of online conspiracy theories that claim the Kettle Springs Massacre never happened. It’s a deranged but relentless fantasy, and there’s nothing Quinn can do to get people to hear the truth—not even on her own campus or in her own dorm room.

So when a murderous clown attacks Quinn at a frat party while another goes after her father in Kettle Springs at the same time, Quinn realizes that the facts alone are never going to save her. Her only option is to go back into the cornfields, back where the nightmare began, to set the record straight the only way she knows how. Because when the truth gets lost in the lies, that’s when people start to die.

Clown in a Cornfield was 2020’s Bram Stoker Award Winner for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives is perfectly set to attract old and new fans to the series.

• Perfect for Halloween Reading
• For teens who love dark and scary stories

As I said in my review for Clown in a Cornfield, I found it much easier to listen to this book than I did to read it. So when I went to start Clown in a Cornfield 2: Frendo Lives, I went straight for the audiobook. Fortunately, my local public library carries this series, so I was able to snag this one as an audiobook as well.

First, I want to shout out to Jesse Vilinsky. She does an amazing job of narrating this series. I mean, AMAZING. The voices she’s created for each of the characters is now ubiquitous with those characters in my mind. I cannot imagine one of them speaking in any other voice.

When I first started Frendo Lives, I hadn’t imagined that we’d be combining PTSD with Internet Conspiracy Theories, but here we are, and it is amazing. I should have known that this would be part of the package, since this takes place in modern times with YouTube and Instagram. I’ve seen so many hoax videos, conspiracy theory videos, and more when scrolling YouTube that I should have guessed that this would be the case for the second installment.

But that just made the book more believable. The fact that there would be people out there, across the country, who believed a completely different story. The ones who refused to believe the media and its reports. It makes it believable because that’s the state of society today.

The characters in this book are still good old Quinn, Cole, and Rust, but they’re a tad older, a tad wiser, and a whole lot more wary than they were before. Happily ever after? Not quite and they know it. They know better. And they know that there are people who think that they were the ones responsible for the Founders Day Massacre, not the ones who were really reponsible.

There are twists and turns, people who’ve done things you’d never guess, and people who have tried to make up for their wrongs. There are people we didn’t expect to see again (although I kind of did) and an ending that might have you guessing as to how the third book is going to play out.

This was another 4 star read and I’m anxiously awaiting my hold for Clown in a Cornfield 3: Church of Frendo to be available for me to download and listen.