The Beauty and Horror of Physical Media with Adam Cesare

Cesare looks back fondly on his fourth book, Video Night, which was released way back in 2013 and set in 1988. The official summary claims the novel is “Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Breakfast Club, and that description is definitely a bullseye with this book.

 Its connection to VHS and physical collector nostalgia also reveals his own tendencies. 

“I think there’s something about physical media that we can connect with what we’re consuming so much more intimately,” Cesare says. “In a good way and a bad way, as I glance down at my office floor, which I haven’t organized my collection in a few weeks, and it’s looking very much like an episode of Hoarders.”

Self-deprecating jokes aside, Video Night looks back at a specific flavor of ‘80s and VHS nostalgia with more adult eyes. Cesare wanted to show something different with protagonists Billy and Tom than another “glossy, Amblin-esque ‘80s” creature feature, but he also realized the success of Stranger Things after the initial publication has served this book really well over 3 editions (multiple if you count Thunderstorm Books’ limited edition). 

“I think Billy and Tom in Video Night are a little older than that stuff. What’s that famous tweet? About ‘me and my friends would have killed ET with hammers?’”

Cesare often balances pulpy humor with extreme gore, but Mercy House’s geriatric setting carried an inherent sadness like recent works by Nick Cutter (The Dorians) and Philip Fracassi (The Autumn Springs Retirement Massacre). When writing Mercy House, Cesare thinks that “humor doesn’t necessarily negate stakes or emotion.” 

“There’s plenty of gross-out stuff in my work, and laughs in certain cases, but I approach all my characters with: ‘well, no matter how outrageous things get, I’m always going to treat this person as a person.’”

Of the three reissues the horror writer had come out this year (Video Night, Zero Lives Remaining, and Mercy House), Mercy House is easily the book that’s changed the most. “I rewrote huge chunks of it, touched up nearly every passage,” Cesare remembers.

Whatever the reason, getting back into the headspace wasn’t hard. I just have a lot more tools in my toolbelt now than I did back then. So late-thirties Adam had to flex on late-twenties Adam a bit. I’m very proud of the result!

Cesare’s Zero Lives Remaining brilliantly taps into the grime, isolation, and distinct culture of classic arcade gaming spaces. Discussing its ’80s influences, Cesare highlights the meditative, high-score-based nature of coin-op games like Joust, Burger Time, and Mappy. 

“There’s something very meditative about coin-op, high-score-based games,” Cesare muses. “You’re given limited lives, somewhat limited paths to success (sometimes there’s only one exact right way to approach a game), and you have to learn the game in a way that modern games don’t really encourage. He likens classic arcade games to “(sometimes opaque) puzzle boxes.” 

"Joust, Burger Time, Mappy: these are all games that don’t hand you anything but the absolute basics in their demo screens and cabinet instructions. A weird mix of ‘let me get in a flow state’ and ‘lemme puzzle this out.’” Cesare argues.

This nostalgic atmosphere permeates the horror book, drawing heavily from Cesare's own childhood arcade memories. Interestingly, while Street Fighter Alpha receives a lot of love in Zero Lives Remaining, Cesare admittedly avoided playing competitive fighters in public arcades due to a fear of losing.

Instead, Cesare reserved fighters for home consoles, and dropped his arcade quarters into cooperative beat ’em ups like X-Men, The Simpsons, and TMNT for an easygoing experience with friends. “Maybe I’m terrified of losing. Maybe I’m non-confrontational.”

Clown in a Cornfield is Adam Cesare’s first foray into the young adult genre, and boy, it was a doozy. 

The generational war and Arthur Hill’s paranoid “make things great again” motivations struck a massive nerve in 2020, but the socio-political landscape has fractured even further in 2026 after Frendo the clown continued his own reign of terror on the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri. Cesare’s tongue is firmly placed in his cheek when discussing the sociopolitical parts of the ongoing CiaC series.

 “Oh, I don’t know what you’re talking about. These are entirely apolitical books,” he jokes. “But really, I’m not sure if things have gotten worse in that way since 2020, as far as being a young person in America is concerned. But I do think things have gotten more complex. Or at the very least weirder. And the CiaC sequels have been—among other things—me trying to explore that.”

Teenage protagonist Quinn Maybrook is a senior in high school and recently moved from Philadelphia after the tragic death of her mother, Samantha. Her father, Glenn, was hired as the new town physician, and they’re both trying to move on the best they can in a town on the downturn after the shuttering and arson at Baypen Corn Syrup Factory.

At study hall, Quinn starts befriending a new group, and she’s invited to the annual Founder’s Day celebration, despite her teacher, Mr. Vern, banning the kids from the event. A nearby party in a cornfield is where the body count begins as Frendo the Clown begins to pick off the high schoolers. Cesare wanted Quinn to not be your typical “final girl.” 

He wanted to avoid the “kind of shallow ‘this character’s been through TRAUMA so now they’re just Sarah Connor from [Terminator 2].” That layered, anti-hero humanity starts with the first book.

The real-world horror of Influencer originated as an audio-exclusive before hitting print. The audiobook is definitely the best way to experience this one. Cesare tells me he listens to an audiobook each week, and he thinks it’s really impacted his writing career, especially with how he writes the Clown in a Cornfield series. 

For Influencer, the structure of the story in audiobook form really impacted Cesare’s story. “I like to write multi-POV titles; I like jumping around to different characters, but the way this was going to be produced, I knew it would be a tight first-person alternating POV for our two leads (Isabela Merced and Christopher Briney),” Cesare notes.

“And what makes that weird is I, personally, feel just as much of a kinship with the villain (a manipulative Instagram post who views himself as the next coming of Charles Manson) as I do with the hero (the socially anxious wallflower who has to try to stop him),” Cesare continues. 

“Social media, the desire to be ‘a brand’ as an author, is necessary, to an extent, but also kind of… sociopathic?”

In short, CiaC 4 is Frendo Goes Hollywood. Cesare had great memories on the set of the Clown in a Cornfield movie, which definitely inspired the latest book in the series. 

“I had a really great time on my one, very brief set visit (when you watch the movie, you can see me in the bleachers during the parade sequence),” Cesare says. Cesare really respects [director] Eli Craig and [Quinn Maybrook actress] Katie Douglas, and the rest of the people who made the movie, so I went to extra lengths in a lot of cases, while I was filling out the cast of my ‘movie within a book’ in Book 4, to be clear that these are not caricatures of real people. Mostly.”

Looking forward, Cesare has some plans brewing for his most famous series. “I know this is a text interview, but imagine me wiggling my eyebrows at you and saying ‘you’ll see.’”

He thinks the next book can be any number of things beyond a numbered sequel. “But Book five (if it’s even called book five, if we don’t do something crazy like an unnumbered sequel or a spin-off) will be years from now. 

In the meantime, I hope everyone checks out my non-Clown in a Cornfield books. Especially the upcoming Bloodsick, which is a teen vampire book… but a very gross and upsetting teen vampire book.”