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A review by phenchurch42
Burn the Negative by Josh Winning
3.0
Listened to the audiobook
As a child, Laura starred in the 90’s horror flick “The Guest House” about a haunted hotel. She carries the usual child star trauma, having endured her mom’s stage-parenting and brutal line-memorization techniques, and her sister’s jealousy of her success. Tragedy followed the film as several members of the cast and crew died in ways eerily similar to the deaths in the film, and after a kidnapping attempt, Laura left the biz, obscured her identity and the family moved abroad. Now an entertainment-focused journalist reluctantly caring for her mother with dementia, Laura is manipulated into covering the film’s reboot as a Netflix series. The moment she arrives in LA, deaths start to pile up and the anonymously-played demon from the film seems to be lurking around every corner. Working with her sister and the new project’s “psycho psychic,” Laura has to figure out what’s going on before her identity is revealed and/or she’s held responsible for the recent deaths.
I have a few beefs with this story, one big one being the insistence on calling the main MacGuffin a “paper fortune teller” when it is obviously a cootie catcher. Other than that, I thought this moved along at a nice clip and was a solid story. I loved the last-act twist though it did somewhat negate the denouement of the general story… trauma’s a bitch, y’all. I was reminded of some other haunted-movie stories, especially Paul Tremblay’s “Horror Movie,” and Paul Tremblay’s “Head Full of Ghosts,” both also about set goings-on and peppered with multi-media asides, but I liked those, and ultimately this was different enough to hold my interest.
As a child, Laura starred in the 90’s horror flick “The Guest House” about a haunted hotel. She carries the usual child star trauma, having endured her mom’s stage-parenting and brutal line-memorization techniques, and her sister’s jealousy of her success. Tragedy followed the film as several members of the cast and crew died in ways eerily similar to the deaths in the film, and after a kidnapping attempt, Laura left the biz, obscured her identity and the family moved abroad. Now an entertainment-focused journalist reluctantly caring for her mother with dementia, Laura is manipulated into covering the film’s reboot as a Netflix series. The moment she arrives in LA, deaths start to pile up and the anonymously-played demon from the film seems to be lurking around every corner. Working with her sister and the new project’s “psycho psychic,” Laura has to figure out what’s going on before her identity is revealed and/or she’s held responsible for the recent deaths.
I have a few beefs with this story, one big one being the insistence on calling the main MacGuffin a “paper fortune teller” when it is obviously a cootie catcher. Other than that, I thought this moved along at a nice clip and was a solid story. I loved the last-act twist though it did somewhat negate the denouement of the general story… trauma’s a bitch, y’all. I was reminded of some other haunted-movie stories, especially Paul Tremblay’s “Horror Movie,” and Paul Tremblay’s “Head Full of Ghosts,” both also about set goings-on and peppered with multi-media asides, but I liked those, and ultimately this was different enough to hold my interest.