In this incendiary mash-up of horror and suspense, a notorious slasher film is remade…and the curse that haunted it is reawakened.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Josh Winning’s Burn the Negative, which is out July 11th.
Arriving in L.A. to visit the set of a new streaming horror series, journalist Laura Warren witnesses a man jumping from a bridge, landing right behind her car. Here we go, she thinks. It’s started. 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.
In The Guesthouse, Laura played the little girl with the terrifying gift to tell people how the Needle Man would kill them. When eight of the cast and crew died in ways that eerily mirrored the movie’s on-screen deaths, the film became a cult classic—and ruined her life. Leaving it behind, Laura 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—and to stay out of the Needle Man’s lethal reach.
ONE
By the time Laura Warren realized she was fucked, she was already halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.
The plane was full and she’d popped a sleeping pill thirty minutes ago, washed it down with a plastic cup of red wine. It dulled the drone of the engine and made the shapes of her fellow passengers pleasantly hazy. She could almost pretend they weren’t there.
Travel was one of the few remaining perks of being a journalist. Her job had taken her all over the world: Tokyo, New York, Sofia. That last, an article about the city’s booming film industry, earned her a lethal-looking award two years ago that ended up buried in the cupboard she called an office, along with a small forest’s worth of Zeppelin magazine back issues. Awards weren’t her thing. She just wanted to write words that mattered.
Los Angeles, though.
That made her want to take more sleeping pills.
The digital flight chart on the seat back in front of her showed a plane edging closer to California no matter how badly Laura willed it to turn around, and the pill wasn’t working fast enough to numb the anxiety that razored her lungs. She wished the steward would circle back with the wine. He could leave the bottle if he liked.
Her neighbor grunted in his sleep, his knee pressing into hers.
Laura grimaced and shifted over. She wasn’t a nervous traveler, had never been freaked out by the altitude or baby food, but she found planes to be a lot. The lack of space made her feel enormous. Like she was taking up more room than anybody else. More air.
She had caught the look from her neighbor when he sat down. Annoyance that his ability to manspread would be inhibited all the way from London to L.A. She could tell him to go to hell, of course. That she wanted to be there as little as he did.
Instead, she made a joke about how cozy the next eleven hours would be and, when he merely nodded, swallowed her frustration and opened her first mini-pack of pretzels.
Thirty-seven years old and she still filled every awkward silence with a joke.
Taking a breath, she resolved to keep her mind occupied until she passed out. She tapped the iPad propped on the tray table, opening the press release she’d started to read but neglected to finish in the lead-up to the trip. Everything was always so last-minute these days, and press documents gave her a headache. Their robotic enthusiasm was exhausting.
Begrudgingly, she scanned the first couple of pages, then scrolled to the “About the Production” section on page three. She read the first line—
Streaming mini-series It Feeds is a modern reinterpretation of ’90s horror movie The Guesthouse.
—and every nerve in her body snapped.
Hair prickled on the back of her neck as if charged with electricity.
With numb hands, she dragged the iPad closer, convinced she was seeing things. She willed the sentence to change, to rearrange itself, but no matter how many times she read it, the words remained the same.
The Guesthouse.
THE GUESTHOUSE.
The goddamn motherfucking Guesthouse.
Her body suddenly felt distant, a concept rather than a physical object, as her mind went into overdrive. It buzzed with a single question like a wasp trapped in a glass.
How the hell did Mike find out about her past?
