Books like “Clown in a Cornfield”

What to read after “Clown in a Cornfield” by Adam Cesare: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
My Heart Is a Chainsaw
Stephen Graham Jones · 2021
Same genre: “Slasher fiction” and “Horror fiction”
Jade, a high-school senior obsessed with slasher films, is sure a killer has come to her small Idaho town. Nobody believes her, so she pins her hopes on a new classmate she thinks is destined to be the final girl who survives. Her theory is also a way of outlasting her own life.
2
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett · 2020
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
- Small Town Secrets
- Coming of Age
Twin sisters from a small Southern town where everyone is light-skinned choose opposite lives: one returns to raise a Black daughter, the other passes as white and hides her past. Across the decades, their daughters' paths unexpectedly cross.
3
The Final Girl Support Group
Grady Hendrix · 2021
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Final Girl
- Survival
Six women who each survived a famous mass murder meet in a therapist's group to cope with the aftermath. When one of them is killed, the group's most guarded member goes on the run to learn who is hunting them and why their old cases keep being reopened.
4
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Holly Jackson · 2019
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
- Small Town Secrets
- Coming of Age
For a school project, Pip reopens the closed case of Andie Bell, a local girl murdered five years ago, and her boyfriend Sal, who confessed and then died. As she records interviews with the people involved, the tidy story everyone accepted begins to come apart.
5
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens · 2018
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
Abandoned by her family as a child, Kya grows up alone in a North Carolina marsh, shunned by the nearby town as the Marsh Girl. She teaches herself to survive on the land and inches toward love, until a local man is found dead and she becomes the chief suspect.
6
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires
Grady Hendrix · 2020
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
- Survival
Patricia, a suburban housewife in 1990s Charleston, joins a true-crime book club that becomes the only excitement in her week. When a new neighbour is suspected of preying on local children, the women try to convince a town that would rather not listen, and then take matters into their own hands.
7
The Silent Sister
Diane Chamberlain · 2014
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
- Small Town Secrets
After her father's death, Riley returns to their North Carolina house to settle his estate. Sorting through his papers, she finds evidence that her older sister, long believed to have killed herself as a teenager, may be alive and living under another name.
8
Final Girls
Riley Sager · 2017
Similar plot moves: “Final Girl” and “Survival”
- Final Girl
- Survival
Ten years after surviving a massacre at a remote cabin in the woods, Quincy has built a quiet life out of pills, baking and careful routine. When another survivor from that group of women dies and a third turns up at her door, the past she cannot fully remember starts to close in again.
9
Ghost Story
Peter Straub · 1979
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
- Small Town Secrets
Four elderly friends in a small New York town have spent a lifetime telling each other ghost stories at their club. Now something from a winter forty years earlier, a death they all helped to hide, has returned to collect the debt.
10
The Reformatory
Tananarive Due · 2023
Same genre: “Horror fiction”
Florida, 1950. Twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school after a scuffle with a white teenager. He can see ghosts, including the boys who died there, and the warden wants to use that ability. Outside, his sister works with a lawyer to bring him home.
11
A Flicker in the Dark
Stacy Willingham · 2022
Similar setting: “Small Town Secrets”
- Small Town Secrets
As a child she helped put her father away for killing girls. Twenty years later she is a therapist about to marry, when young women in her town begin to disappear again and the old case follows her into the present.
12
Black-Eyed Susans
Julia Heaberlin · 2015
Shared in the plot: teenage, death
- Final Girl
As a teenager, Tessa was the only victim to survive the killer who buried girls in a Texas field of wildflowers, and her testimony sent a man to death row. Nearly twenty years later, fresh flowers appear near her home, and lawyers ask her to recover the memories she lost.