NNtG: Bone Chillers #22: Killer Clown of Kings County

$467.04

$530.50

$1,038.00

Those numbers above are important to the context of this opening. Those are the prices on eBay (in Canada mind) for this book as of the time of writing this blog. Those are the exorbitant prices this book is asking for online. For you see, some Bone Chillers books can be quite tricky to find. You might luck out on a couple in the wild, but it's one of those series that have editions considered so hard to find that copies can go for a bit of money. Some going for about 40, 50, the occasional 80. But no book in this series has earned the reputation of being the vaunted "super rare holy grail" in the series quite like this one. Unless you were absolutely lucky to find this maybe at a thrift store or a flea market, you would have to pay out the ass for this book if you were collecting the entire series. In other words, this book would have been impossible to cover for the blog because heeeeelllll no I'm not paying that much for any book. So thank goodness the book was uploaded online so I can actually cover this damn thing. So it's a rare book. But does that rarity equate to a good story? Let's clown around without breaking the bank as we cover Killer Clown of Kings County. 

This is as Tim Jacobus a cover as you can get. From the POV, the warping, the garish checkerboard colors, and the creepy open maw of the clown, you could guess super quickly that this was a cover drawn by the Goosebumps guy. Our titular clown is rather creepy looking, and does have an intensity about his face that I would see myself finding scary. I like the touch of the balloons. The bird, the bull, the cat, the one that might be a bear but also looks like a hamster, so I'm calling subtle Monster Blood II reference and a creepy looking skull. So the cover delivers on giving you a clown that certainly fits the bill of killer. 

Zeke Simpson's twelfth birthday party isn't what he wanted. And that's because his mom hired a clown for his party. This makes Zeke worried because having a clown at his party is going to make him look like a loser, especially to his friends Eddie and Joanna. He puts on his blue baseball cap and heads down to the party where he meets the clown himself, Idris Zanzibar McFloot. Nothing out and out odd about this clown. Orange frizzy hair, makeup, wearing a magician's costume. Zeke notices that Idris may have a painted smile, but the clown looks rather sad looking. Maybe he doubles as a sad clown painting model. He's so transfixed on the clown's look that he falls for the old Joy Buzzer trick. Idris then pulls a trick where he takes a bunch of handkerchiefs and puts them in his hat, only for them to pop up under Zeke's hat. Joanna heckles the act while Eddie seems scared, as if Idris did this by actual magic or something. 

Joana is called up for Idris' next trick. He squirts her with his flower, then gives her a towel to dry off. But before she grabs it, he pulls out a hair dryer and blasts her with it. Zeke and the others applaud, but Eddie again seems freaked out. Zeke has gone from clown hater to clown appreciator. Idris then takes Zeke's hat and makes it disappear. He gives it back on one condition. Zeke, Joanna and Eddie have to be his apprentices and head to his clown college to learn. So with no other alternative besides, you know, just buying another hat, Zeke and the three agree to head to the clown college. As they make their way there, Eddie notes that Idris was rather weird. He seemed to know all their names, and almost could read their minds, knowing how they felt about the situation. The other two just chalk it all up to mere coincidence and Zeke's mom telling Idris what's up. But Eddie's worried since there was a story when he was younger about a clown that looked like Idris who also lured kids to a clown school. Those kids were never heard from again. 

The trio run into Idris, who doesn't take them to the college since it's getting late. He instead gives the three handbooks on becoming a clown, telling them to read it. He gives Eddie a clown nose, Joanna some handkerchiefs and Zeke his clown top hat. Before he leaves he tells the trio to study up and most importantly, to never try to beat a clown at his own game. As the three head home, Zeke and Joanna look at the handbooks, especially a disappearing act called the Box of Doom. Eddie's just annoyed at the whole ordeal, thinking that something's not right about Idris, and that Joanna and Zeke are starting to actually act more like clowns. Zeke heads home and reads his handbook some more. That night, Zeke reads more of the handbook and puts on the top hat. It causes his hair to turn orange and to be more windblown like a clown's.  And what's worse, he's missing his handbook Joanna suffers the same fate of kooky clown hair. As for Eddie, he put on the clown nose and it won't come off. When they visit him, it's removed, but now his hair is red. And going by the assortment of tools strewn about, Eddie and his parents were on the verge of cutting off his nose to get the damn thing off. Would be an extreme way to do it but damn would his face ever be spited. Thankfully the way to actually remove it is in the handbook.

Eddie's tired of this and gives Zeke his handbook saying that he washes his hands of all of this clowning around, much to Zeke and Joanna's protests. Zeke, being both an idiot and fully down to clown, says that he'll put the nose on and if it stays stuck he'll believe Eddie that maybe this weird clown guy they just met might have ulterior motives. He returns home and puts the nose on and sure enough it gets stuck to his face before he reads Eddie's handbook. He also sees instructions to make anything come out of the top hat, which he uses to get his handbook back, even though now even he doesn't quite want it. The next morning, Zeke wakes up with his skin a pale clown-makeup white and his cheeks pink. Joanna has also suffered the same affliction. Zeke asks his mom how she even contacted Idris in the first place, to which she says the phone book. Zeke searches, but can't find any listings for an Idris Zanzibar McFloot. He also is unable to stop laughing for a brief period after touching the handbook which makes Zeke realize that the handbook is the root cause for how clowned condition. 

Zeke heads out the next morning to get rid of the top hat and the books, but runs into Idris. Zeke throws the books to the ground and tells Idris that he doesn't want to be a clown anymore. However Idris says that's too bad since once you go clown you can never come down. Idris then zaps Zeke again with the joy buzzer and vanishes. Zeke runs into Joanna who has a squirting flower stuck to her jacket. Things go no better for them at school when Zeke buzzes his teacher and Joanna squirts hers. No sign of Eddie though. But, frustrated at all of this clownery, they decide to leave school and search for Idris. They make it to Eddie's who is in full clown form with the red nose back on his face. Joanna starts to talk, but she begins to essentially puke handkerchiefs. No matter how much she pulls out of her mouth, it never seems to end. All three start to argue with one another until Zeke realizes that their squabbling is what Idris wants. "Never beat a clown at his own game" and they seem to be trying to unwillingly outdo one another with their antics. As they try to figure out what to do, Idris shows up and mocks Joanna for having a mouthful of handkerchief and the trio's poor clown antics. That's why he's come to take them to clown college.

Idris takes the kids to his limo and tells them what's up. They were chosen by him because they have the clown spirit in them. Their need to prank, their heckling, their one-upmanship, all trademarks of worthy clowns. Idris felt he needed to be the one to bring that clown spirit out in the open. But to truly see who is clown material and who wants to leave the clowning behind them, there's one final test. The aforementioned Box of Doom, which will settle everything once and for all. He takes them to the clown college, which looks more like an abandoned building than a big circus tent, and shows them the box of doom which is a large black box with a bottomless pit. He grabs Joanna, but Zeke grabs her handkerchiefs and runs around with them. Idris gives chase, but Zeke manages to zap him with the buzzer. Joanna squirts with the flower and the three manage to send Idris into the box of doom as he plummets. Soon things start to finally revert to normal for the three.

The kids are caught by their parents and the principal and get grounded for ditching school and clowning around without their consent. But the three are happy to be done with all of this. At least until Zeke returns to his room and finds the two copies of the clown handbook on his floor.

This book was good. I wouldn't quite say "worth spending 500+ dollars good" but still good. It's the second book by Daniel Ehrenhaft, who previously did The Thing Under the Bed, which I also liked. I do think this one is a better offering with much better pacing and a fun story with a decent horror setting. Granted, you don't exactly get a murder clown, but you could by that Idris definitely killed some kids who didn't want to clown around with him and that the Box of Doom did just that. I like the horror of the clown transformations as there are some actually creepy implications that come with them. The skin going pale white, the implications of how hard it was to get the nose off, the handkerchiefs in Joanna's mouth. Even right down to how it seems to turn them more and more clownlike, right down to not being able to stop laughing. It all works to give us one of the more fun horror scenarios we've gotten in Bone Chillers. Granted not as extreme as some cases, but still pretty close.

I will say though that, of all the books I've covered so far in Bone Chillers, this is the most Goosebumps feeling of the bunch as it does feel like a scenario that Stine would have written for it. Thankfully without Stine's trappings like the fake out chapter stingers which would have really made this one a stinker. And a GB-like feeling close to Goosebumps isn't a bad thing when done right, and I thankfully haven't come into many cases where these books take Stine's worst trappings and base their stories this way. And not every book needs to go buck wild insane either. Sometimes you just need a book that's entertaining enough to not feel like you wasted an hour or so reading. But for the praise I give, this isn't a book that's worth shelling out that much money for, even if you're going for a full collection of Bone Chillers books. I'd rather go through the arduous trek of hoping to physical in the wild for a couple bucks over the wild prices it goes for. It always could be a case where this book really is that rare or if it's a book that earned notoriety for supposedly being so rare that its value grossly ballooned over time. It feels like a case of overhyping a book's value to give collectors a severe case of FOMO. 

Zeke is a decent protagonist. He gets roped into this whole clown thing and you feel bad for him, hoping he can make it out of all this just fine. Joanna works as a decent friend who starts overly sarcastic, but mellows out once the clowning gets bad. Eddie disappears for chunks of the book, but I like that he's sort of the most level headed of the group. He's presented early as a prankster and smartass on the level of Joanna, but we never actually see him in action. Idris is a really great villain. You don't get much of his deal, but there's enough sprinkled in to make it clear that he just lures kids into the world of clowning and sends them to their dooms, literally, through the box of doom. I wish we did get a bit more history on him since the book gave us mere breadcrumbs early on, but I don't think the lack of context on him really hurt the book in any meaningful way. 

So overall, this was a good Bone Chillers book. Not the wildest, and maybe not the most memorable in the grand scheme, but still a fun clown horror story that does what it sets out to do quite well. This is the part where I recommend it, but I will DEFNITELY recommend you find an affordable way to read it. Archive thankfully had it available to read which is how I found it, so if you really want to read it, and don't want to waste that much money in this bullshit economy, I'd go that route. Anyone who actually pays 500-1000 for this book definitely deserve to wear permanent clown makeup. Killer Clown of Kings County gets a B+.