CARING FOR YOUR CLOWN BOOK THREE

Blume continues his YA SF saga in which trans teen Oliver Jariwala and his friends encounter unearthly clowns who aren’t very funny at all.

Oliver Jariwala’s mother, a scientist, vanished during a test of a “molecular transporter.” In her place there appeared Dindet, a unicellular entity whose species generally manifest themselves as types of clowns, including mimes and jesters (in the novel’s planet- and dimension-spanning cosmos, “Clown” is a legitimate life-form category). Dindet masqueraded as a “foreign” visiting student at Oliver’s school, but several classmates have learned the incredible truth. One of them, Douglass, is Oliver’s closest friend and secret crush. Douglass’ scientist father was complicit in Dindet’s capture and apparent death in a heartless lab experiment. Oliver is tormented, manipulated, and sexually degraded by Markus, a cruel senior at his school. Oliver is placed in the hands of psychologists and authorities after lashing out at a taunting Markus in a violent episode. Meanwhile, Douglass and others come to the realization that long-standing disappearances and other creepy stuff in their community signify that Dindet was not the only alien Clown at large. Readers of the previous books in the series already know that the other Clowns, unlike Dindet, are neither playful nor funny. In fact, the author prefaces the text with a long list of “triggering content” found in the story; the YA-skewed material becomes a near-nonstop horror show of young people being victimized by adults and/or taloned, tentacled monstrosities. Oliver’s gender and the ways kids and adults react are addressed now and again (“It didn’t used to be this way. We were all right. Boy’s were boys, girls were girls, men married women and then that stupid president got elected and now all of them think it’s completely fine to flaunt that shit out in public”), though this thread is overshadowed by the increasingly apocalyptic main attraction under this killer-Clown circus tent. A cliffhanger ending hits readers with even more shocking twists.

A YA horror/SF Clownaggedon more direly traumatic in each installment—approach with caution.