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The Many Lives of Scary Clowns
Essays on Pennywise, Twisty, the Joker, Krusty and More
Edited by Ron Riekki
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Book Presentation:
The frightening yet comic clown is one of the best and most enduring characters in literature, theater, television, and film. Across the centuries, from Shakespeare’s Porter in Macbeth to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog,” or Stephen King’s Pennywise, horror and comedy have blended to create the perfect recipe for entertainment. This volume gives an in-depth analysis of the clown horror genre, including essays by revered horror scholars such as Kevin Wetmore, Dale Bailey, Kim Hester Williams, Jennifer K. Cox, and Joanna Parypinski. Their essays cover topics such as nostalgia, race, class, and new portrayals of the scary clown as zombies or phantoms. It also offers interviews with actors and directors working in the clown horror genre: Eoghan McQuinn (Stitches), Kevin Kangas (Fear of Clowns), and Jaysen Buterin (Kill Giggles). Some of fiction’s most terrifying creations–like the Killer Klowns, Captain Spaulding, Art the Clown, Krusty, Frowny, the Joker, and Twisty–jig through these pages of analysis and deconstruction, asking what these many iterations of scary clowns have to say about our society and its fears.
About the Author:
Writer and actor Ron Riekki has won several screenplay awards including best sci-fi/fantasy from the International Family Film Festival, best comedy from the Los Angeles Film Awards and the Nuclear Pen Award from the GenreBlast Film Festival.
Press Reviews:
Finalist, Oddest Book Title of the Year—The Guardian’s Diagram Prize
See the publisher website: McFarland & Co
> From the same author:
The Many Lives of The Purge (2024)
Essays on the Horror Franchise
Dir. Ron Riekki and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.
The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone (2022)
Essays on the Television and Film Franchise
Dir. Ron Riekki and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.
Subject: One Film > The Twilight Zone (TV Series)
The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (2019)
Essays on the Cult Film Franchise
Dir. Ron Riekki and Jeffrey A. Sartain
Subject: One Film > The Evil Dead
> On a related topic:
The Politics of Monstrous Figures in Contemporary Cinema (2025)
Witches, Zombies, and Cyborgs Re-enchanting the Ends of the World
The Cinematic Boogeyman (2024)
From the Fairytale to the Slasher Film
Phases of the Moon (2020)
A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film
Elder Horror (2019)
Essays on Film's Frightening Images of Aging
Dir. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Our Old Monsters (2015)
Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema
Dracula in Visual Media (2010)
Film, Television, Comic Book and Electronic Game Appearances, 1921–2010
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