Burn the Negative
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
*Long-listed for the Bram Stoker Award*
In this incendiary mash-up of horror and suspense, a notorious slasher film is remade…and the curse that haunted it is reawakened.
Fresh off the plane in L.A., here to visit the set of a new streaming horror series, journalist Laura Warren sees a man jumping from a bridge, landing right behind her car. It’s started, she thinks. Because the series she’s reporting on is a remake of a ’90s horror flick. A cursed ’90s horror flick, which she starred in as a child—and has been running from her whole life.
When Laura was eight years old, eight members of the cast and crew died in ways that eerily mirrored the movie’s on-screen deaths, making the film a cult classic—and ruining her life. She changed her name and her accent, dyed her hair, and moved across the Atlantic. But some scripts don’t want to stay buried.
Now, as the body count rises again, Laura finds herself on the run with her aspiring actress sister and a jaded psychic, hoping to end the curse once and for all.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This horror novel is both an unabashed tribute to ’90s slasher movies and a genuinely scary thrill in its own right. Reporter Laura Warren is sent to Hollywood to cover the reboot of a ’90s horror film that became infamous when several of its actors died in ways that weirdly echoed their deaths on screen. What her editor doesn’t know is that Laura is a former child actor—who starred in the original film. And as the new project starts up, so do the deaths. Entertainment journalist Josh Winning makes life (and death) on film sets feel lived-in and realistic even as he conjures the winking tone of horror classics like Final Destination and Scream. He also creates a truly disturbing Freddy Krueger–style baddie with his villain the Needle Man. Even if you’re not a horror buff, Burn the Negative is a wonderfully creepy read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like the classic horror cinema it gleefully riffs on, Winning's latest (after The Shadow Glass) crackles with both dread and dazzle. In 1993, seven-year-old Polly Tremaine starred in the cult horror classic The Guesthouse, a movie whose production was rumored to be cursed: eight of its cast and crew members died during and after filming, all in eerily similar ways to the deaths played out on screen. Thirty years later, Polly, who has reinvented herself as Laura Warren, heads to the set of It Feeds, a miniseries reboot of The Guesthouse that she's covering as a reporter for Zeppelin magazine. There, she begins to have upsetting visions of the film's famous monster, the Needle Man—and people start dying around her once more. Is a supernatural menace haunting Laura? Or is she being mercilessly pranked by her sister, Amy, the set psychic Beverly, or someone else in her inner circle? Winning keeps readers guessing right alongside Laura while throwing out crafty winks and nods to well-known horror films and their makers, and driving his tale to a cinematically spectacular finale with several surprising plot twists. Horror fans should grab the popcorn for this bloody and entertaining romp.
