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The Killer Clown: Painted smile of fear
Paperback
Series: The Terror Lineup (13-Book Horror Anthology Series), Book 10
Mystery & ThrillerGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 24 2025
Pages: 68
Weight: 0.23
Height: 0.14 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
He never touches anyone. He only holds things out, and waits.
The fair arrives in the seaside town of Skelby in the middle of the night, and nobody booked it. By morning the cliff-top green is strung with coloured bulbs, and by the helter-skelter stands a tall, thin clown in a white suit, handing out red balloons with a pair of long steel tongs.
Six-year-old Alfie takes one. That night he laughs in his sleep for an hour and will not wake. In the morning he cannot stop smiling, and the skin at the corners of his mouth has begun to crack like old paint.
His sister Cass has seen the clown's eyes, and she knows the smile is not his. Her grandmother has kept a painted egg in a drawer for seventy-five years, ever since the same fair came for her little sister. Soon there are seven smiling children in the playground, a balloon that will not burst or blow away, and a whole town that cannot stop laughing at a vigil for the missing.
Between the chapters are true sections, headed Under the Lights, on the real history behind the fear: the false smile that the eyes give away, Joseph Grimaldi and the birth of the whiteface clown, the phantom clown panics of 1981 and 2016, the Tanganyika laughter epidemic that closed fourteen schools, the sad clowns of the opera house, and the research into why so many of us find a painted smile frightening.
The Killer Clown: Painted Smile of Fear is a story about the one face you cannot read, and a clear-eyed look at why that fear has such a grip on us. Read it with the lights on.
This second edition has been fully revised. Every fact and quotation in the Under the Lights sections is checked against sources listed at the back. Part of The Terror Line-Up from JD Arden: the fears we carry, told as stories you cannot put down.
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