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A review by booksamongstfriends
Burn the Negative by Josh Winning
3.0
2.75 After reading Heads Will Roll, I was hyped for another Josh Winning book, hoping for a fun, classic slasher. But Burn the Negative didn’t hit the mark for me. It felt indecisive, which sadly, made it fall flat.
The story follows Laura, a former child actor who’s now a journalist in the UK. She gets unknowingly sent to cover the remake of The Guesthouse, the horror film she acted in as a kid—a “cursed” movie where nine people died during or after filming, all in ways that mimicked the film’s plot. Against her better judgment (and mostly out of job fear), Laura agrees to stay on the assignment, despite this being exactly what her parents were trying to get her away from years ago. But once she’s there, strange things start happening, and Laura’s pulled into the dark history of The Guesthouse.
The problem with this book is it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It sets up this supernatural, cursed-movie mystery but then veers into some kind of "me against the world" villain origin story. We spend most of the book watching Laura make one dumb decision after another, refusing to communicate and holding back information that could actually help. By the time we get to the ending, it feels like it’s trying to make Laura’s choices seem meaningful, but it’s just too little, too late. Her decisions are so obviously bad that there’s no way she’s not “in on it” or strategically navigating this. Caring about her becomes pointless when all her choices seem designed to frustrate us.
Honestly, this book would’ve been way more compelling if it focused on Laura’s emotional trauma and how she was treated as a child actor in a ruthless industry. Instead, that angle feels like a rushed afterthought, shoved in to salvage the last chunk of the book. Burn the Negative had potential, but it needed a clearer direction and a deeper exploration of its main character’s psyche.
The story follows Laura, a former child actor who’s now a journalist in the UK. She gets unknowingly sent to cover the remake of The Guesthouse, the horror film she acted in as a kid—a “cursed” movie where nine people died during or after filming, all in ways that mimicked the film’s plot. Against her better judgment (and mostly out of job fear), Laura agrees to stay on the assignment, despite this being exactly what her parents were trying to get her away from years ago. But once she’s there, strange things start happening, and Laura’s pulled into the dark history of The Guesthouse.
The problem with this book is it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It sets up this supernatural, cursed-movie mystery but then veers into some kind of "me against the world" villain origin story. We spend most of the book watching Laura make one dumb decision after another, refusing to communicate and holding back information that could actually help. By the time we get to the ending, it feels like it’s trying to make Laura’s choices seem meaningful, but it’s just too little, too late. Her decisions are so obviously bad that there’s no way she’s not “in on it” or strategically navigating this. Caring about her becomes pointless when all her choices seem designed to frustrate us.
Honestly, this book would’ve been way more compelling if it focused on Laura’s emotional trauma and how she was treated as a child actor in a ruthless industry. Instead, that angle feels like a rushed afterthought, shoved in to salvage the last chunk of the book. Burn the Negative had potential, but it needed a clearer direction and a deeper exploration of its main character’s psyche.