Burn the Negative by Josh Winning
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons
Age Group: Adult
Format: Fiction
Genres and Categories: British Authors, Gay Authors, Mental Health Representation, Journalist Characters, Monsters, Mystery, Mental Health, Trauma, 1990s, Horror Thriller, Slasher, Supernatural, Pop Culture, Suspense
My Rating:
Published on: 11th July 2023
Pages: 368
Disability Representation: Anxiety, Black-Outs, Delusions, Mental Health, Skin Picking, Suicide
Buy this Book! Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Blackwells / Forbidden Planet / Bookshop.org US / Bookshop.org UK / Waterstones / BookBeat Audio
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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.

This book was provided for free by Black Crow PR, NetGalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this book!

Content Warnings:

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Josh Winning’s novel The Shadow Glass blew me away with its mixture of nostalgia, pop culture and fantasy, and I was excited to hear that he was bringing two of those to his next novel. In Burn the Negative, Winning proves that he can master more than one genre, taking on horror and applying the same love for nostalgia and pop culture to his story that made The Shadow Glass so interesting.

In 1993, the horror movie filming of The Guesthouse became infamous when eight of the cast and crew died in ways that eerily mirrored the movie’s on-screen deaths, prompting people to claim that the movie was cursed. It gained a cult following with people trading theories for decades later, including what happened to Polly Tremaine, the child actor who played the little girl who told people how they died in the movie. Polly mysteriously disappeared after the movie was released, and no one knows what happened to her.

Laura knows. Laura is Polly, or she was. After something happened that terrified her parents, her whole family moved to England, and Polly became Laura. Since then, Laura has changed everything about herself, including her hair and her accent. She’s a well-published entertainment journalist, and for the first time since leaving L.A., she finds herself heading back there to cover a new streaming horror series at the insistence of her boss, who also happens to be her ex. She’s never told him about her past. It’s only when she opens the press release on the plane that she’s been set up, and somehow he found out – because the series is based on that movie. The movie. The one her entire family ran away from.

Making a remake of “the most haunted film in Hollywood history” goes about as well as you would expect. It doesn’t take long before a body count starts, and Laura finds herself smack bang in the middle of it all. She has the new production’s psychic on one side telling her it’s something supernatural, and her little sister on the other telling her that it’s a person because it has to be something real… right?

Winning does an excellent job of playing both of these theories off against each other throughout the book. One moment, you will believe it’s one, and then the other he throws perfectly good evidence at the reader that proves it has to be the other. He skilfully manipulates every moment of every scene, making the reader question everything and everyone. Nothing is what it seems in Burn the Negative, and the twists in this book are some of the best I have seen. The ending you will never see coming.

Just like in The Shadow Glass, Winning has created an entire experience, not just a book. Each chapter is interspersed with extracts from books about horror movies, interview clips, segments from The Guesthouse script, and even online cult movie buff websites/social media pages. Winning’s passion for pop culture and his own personal experience as an entertainment journalist shine through in this book, especially.

The only reason this is a four-star read for me rather than a five-star is because, at the end of the day, slasher flicks aren’t my thing. So it says a lot that a book about a slasher flick with slasher flick violence style scenes gets such a high rating from me. Its strength is in the character development, suspense and mind games that Winning plays with the reader. Burn the Negative is all about unravelling the mystery of what actually happened all those years ago on the set of The Guesthouse and why it’s happening again. If you’re expecting anything stereotypical, think again.

About Josh Winning

Josh Winning is a nostalgia nut, book/film lover and author of The Shadow Glass, which is like Labyrinth meets Stranger Things, and Burn the Negative, which is like Scream meets My Best Friend’s Exorcism.
He is senior film writer at Radio Times, writer at Total Film, SFX and Den of Geek, and the co-host of movie podcast Torn Stubs. He has been on set with Kermit the Frog (and Miss Piggy), devoured breakfast with zombies on The Walking Dead, and sat on the Iron Throne on the Dublin set of Game of Thrones.
Josh lives with his cat Penny and dreams of one day convincing Sigourney Weaver to yell “Goddammit!” at him.

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Thanks for reading my review for Burn the Negative by Josh Winning! Burn the Negative is out on July 11th 2023, and can be pre-ordered from any of the links in this review.

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