Six years ago this month, Adam Cesare's Clown in a Cornfield debuted, launching one of the most popular young adult horror franchises in recent memory. Two sequels and one film adaptation, with a sequel on the way, have since followed, but that's not the end of the Clown in a Cornfield story.
Welcome to Lights! Camera! Frendo!
Cesare's fourth book in the series, and the first since the 2025 film adaptation directed by Eli Craig, takes a metafictional approach to the Frendo the Clown universe. While the first three books in the series followed Final Girl Quinn Maybrook as she navigated murderous clowns in and around Kettle Springs, Missouri, the fourth will follow the person playing Quinn Maybrook in the first-ever Frendo the Clown movie.
Lights! Camera! Frendo! follows Sabrina Alvarez, an unknown actress catapulted into the spotlight when she lands the role of Quinn Maybrook in a film based on the Kettle Springs Massacre. Of course, as you'd probably expect from a slasher novel, reality starts to collide with the world of the film, as it becomes clear that somebody doesn't want this movie to be made, and they're willing to take deadly measures to disrupt the set.
So, what's made the Clown in a Cornfield series endure thus far? Part of it is, undoubtedly, the simple fact that a guy in a creepy clown mask murdering teenagers will forever be appealing to horror fans, but over the six years since the first book, Cesare's ambitions have never dimmed.
The first Clown book played with familiar slasher themes and expectations in exciting ways, while the sequel opened up the world of the books to tap into alt-right conspiracies and militias denying the very reality of its Final Girl. The third book, The Church of Frendo, went further, exploring cults and even veering into folk-horror territory while still holding on to the primal slasher thrills at the heart of everything Cesare's written so far.
And now we come to Lights! Camera! Frendo!, a book that plays with the movie-within-a-movie vibes slasher fans know from films like Scream 3, while at the same time pushing the Frendo legend into new territory. Considering Cesare just went through the film adaptation process himself adds yet another layer of metatextual fun to the story.
The fourth Clown in a Cornfield book is out August 18, but you don't have to wait until then for a taste. FANGORIA is pleased to share an exclusive excerpt from the book, courtesy of HarperCollins, featuring Sabrina in the middle of a very tricky and very frightening movie stunt. Check it out below:
It was hot up here, the white paint atop the trailer bouncing the sun back at her.
Sabrina was sweating. Makeup had spritzed her with fake sweat before she’d climbed up here, but at this point, it had all been replaced by the real thing.
“Ready?” one of the two stuntmen in Frendo masks asked her. He held a machete, which Sabrina knew was dull but, from this distance, looked real enough to make her blood pump.
The female Frendo beside him held a pitchfork. Their masks had small differences from each other—they’d been struck from the same mold, but the weathering and paint were varied enough that audiences would be able to distin-guish them during a chase sequence, in close-ups.
The mask was its own thing. Didn’t look like the original that Joseph had shown her.
But did look like it’d be a big seller at Spirit Halloween next season.
“Are you ready?” the man asked again, pulling the latex of his mask up so she could read his lips. She didn’t respond, not with words, but whatever the stuntman saw in her face made him nod. He tilted his chin down to talk on an unseen radio: “Yeah, she’s good.”
The trailer under them lurched, Sabrina steadied herself, arms out like a surfer.
“Hold position,” Kaitlyn said over the megaphone. “Wait for speed,” then corrected: “Truck speed, not camera speed.” Sabrina already felt like they were going fast enough. Must have been forty miles per hour, maybe more. Hot as it was in the Missouri sun, Sabrina’s ears felt cold in the
wind.
“Twenty-five,” Kaitlyn said. “Approaching twenty-five miles per hour.”
Fuck.
“Faster,” David Frank Hansen said. Did he have his own megaphone, or were they sharing?
“Get ready,” Machete Frendo yelled to Sabrina. It was getting hard to hear, with the growl of the truck and the whoosh of wind. The fabric of the Frendo costume was pressing flat against the stuntman’s chest and legs.
“Faster,” DFH boomed. “Hold for speed.” “Faster!”
Sabrina smelled gasoline fumes. “Good,” Kaitlyn said. “Now action.”
The Frendos, Machete and Pitchfork, began to walk along the top of the trailer toward Sabrina. Unlike Sabrina, neither was wearing a harness or guide wire.
She barely needed to act. She was scared of these clowns, wanted to get away, even if it meant walking toward the front of the speeding truck, knowing she was going to have to jump when she reached the end.
“Take your time Sabrina, make it look good,” Hansen yelled.
She felt naked, nervous in a way she never felt while acting. Knowing that there were dozens of eyes on her, her hair whipping, sweat blowing off her in the wind. She didn’t want direction. She wanted to be done, on the other side of this jump.
She crept forward.
That was when the third Frendo appeared, his chainsaw revving.
He launched himself up onto the trailer with her, fast enough and quick enough that she wasn’t quite sure how the effect was achieved. A catapult?
No effect. These are just strong people. The kind of people who hoist chainsaws all the time, can do forward flips, no wires.
Professionals, unafraid.
Their only care in the world getting the shot.
“Looks great!” Hansen’s amplified voice boomed. “Get her!”
Frendo pump-faked with the saw. There was no chain on the chainsaw. She’d been told that, a few minutes ago, in the fog of her lost time. But now, this close to it, exhaust spew-ing out the back of the machine, was that true? It looked plenty real. She didn’t want to find out.
The motor revved twice. There was a voice under that sound, but Sabrina couldn’t make out what it was saying.
“Three!” Chet yelled.
Sabrina ducked, feeling the heat of the chainsaw, the dis-placed air of the swing.
That was close. Very close. She hoped close enough they wouldn’t need a second take.
Hansen’s voice: “Great, now Frendo drops!”
The performer with the chainsaw allowed the momen-tum of his backswing bring him around in a full twirl. He dropped his weapon, letting go of the chainsaw so it landed in the space between the cab and the trailer.
“Sparks! Now die!”
The Frendo continued his twirl, jumping off the trailer and onto the airbag on her left.
Or Sabrina assumed he’d hit the bag. She wasn’t sup-posed to look. She was supposed to be watching in front of her, as the trailer began to separate from the cab. He could be really dead for all she knew.
“Uncouple,” Kaitlyn said.
There was a mechanical whirring, and the trailer beneath her started to slow a bit.
And the distance to the cab started to grow.
Was it a count of three or a count of five? When did Sabrina jump? That number was still lost in the haze of her patchy memory.
“Faster!” Hansen screamed, voice distorting, the volume knob on the bullhorn apparently maxed. Who was he talking to? Sabrina or the drivers? “Closer and faster!”
Was that for the camera or her? She was frozen. The gap widened. Wind whipped. There was so much dirt and dust in her mouth she could hear it crunching as she clenched her teeth.
“Jump, Sabrina! Jump!”
Sabrina ran forward. She took three steps, her forth miss-ing, her left foot midair and her right pushing off with the tip of her toes. Like a cartoon character, discovering gravity.
It didn’t feel like enough force. The cab was going too fast. Getting away from her.
She was going to miss. She was going to fall. She was going to die.
pulped under the wheels
And then her chest slammed into the foam bar she’d been instructed to grab on to.
She’d overshot her jump, nearly bounced off the hand-hold. She dug her elbows down, spittle and blood flying as she screamed a war scream, trying to hold on, trying not to slip down under the wheels of the truck.
“And cut!”
The wind slowed, her hair falling into her eyes.
Her fingers were claws, digging into the foam of her handhold.
The truck came to a stop. Under her, she could hear the winch pulling the trailer back into position, reattaching the two halves of the vehicle.
“We need one more, or we think we got it?” Sabrina heard Kaitlyn’s voice ask.
“What do you think, kid? Want to go for one more?” Hansen asked Sabrina.
She was still gripping the foam, her toes on the bottom rung of the ladder behind the cab.
“David.” Someone else’s voice cut in, it was Chet.
Hands, strong and confident, guided Sabrina down from the ladder.
“Everyone, get back, clear the set,” Kaitlyn said, waving the crew away from the truck, sending them back toward the chase cars, cameras being checked and lenses being cleaned for another shot.
“David,” Chet said again, now that they were alone. “Look at her harness.”
“Looks fine.”
“There’s no guide wire.”
Sabrina swallowed, her fingers ached at the joints from gripping the foam.
“What?” she heard herself ask, her spit tacky and dry.
“What?” Kaitlyn and Hansen asked, voices overlapping, overpowering Sabrina’s.
“I don’t know how, I checked every foot of it this morn-ing. But it broke.”
Sabrina looked up, her neck was sore.
Chet was holding a length of wire, the end crimped. “It broke?”
“I jumped . . . ,” Sabrina said to herself.
Then David Frank Hansen was hugging her, covering her up with the kind of blanket that firefighters and para-medics threw around accident victims.
“You jumped without a wire. And you made it. You’re fucking John McClane. That’s the headline here.”
“Broke?” Kaitlyn asked again. “Or was cut?” “Cut. My shit doesn’t break.”
“Broke or cut, neither of you says a word about this to them,” David said, pointing to the rest of the cast and crew. “What we just did was illegal as shit. But I’m so proud of you, Sabrina.”
He pulled her into a hug. Restrained her.
“So proud,” he said again, his voice raspy with worry. Raspy, but still somehow sounding like her mother’s voice.
She knew she should be angry, frightened by what had just happened.
But she was weak. She wanted him to be proud.
And because he knew what she wanted to hear, the director pushed her away from himself, then patted her on the shoulder one final time and said:
“You’re a star.”
Copyright © 2026 by Temple Hill Publishing LLC. Used with permission from HarperCollins Children’s Books.
Lights! Camera! Frendo! is now available for pre-order from HarperCollins.
