Heads Will Roll by Josh Winning

Book Review

Sarah Deeming

Once a sitcom darling, Willow is now a fallen star, the latest victim of internet cancel culture; her best friend has abandoned her, her fiancée has dumped her, she’s lost her job and her home, and every time she looks at her phone, there’s another death threat, another piece of hate mail. In need of escape, she checks into a summer camp, Camp Castaway, for adults and electronics are handed over at the door. Everyone uses fake names, and no one seems to recognise her; it’s exactly what Willow needs. But things go wrong straight away. With overzealous aggression, the camp leader destroys someone’s MP3, people go missing, and little doll heads turn up in Willow’s room.

Is this the work of Knock Knock Nancy, a witch who was beheaded by a priest and whose soul still walks the forest looking for her head? Willow isn’t sure, but she isn’t going to give up until she finds out what is going on. However, in a camp where everyone is using fake names, including Willow, is there anyone she can actually trust?

Heads Will Roll is a wonderful homage to teen summer camp slasher movies, evoking a retro 80s feel with the lack of technology and the camp activities the campers are recommended to participate in. It also has the standard characters you would expect from this type of story, if a little older, because this is a camp for adults wanting to check out of the world for a while. There is the plucky heroine, a couple of stoners, the stern chef they all avoid even though he is the same age as them, an overly religious even older adult, and the cool older “kid” in the form of Willow’s childhood hero, the actor Juniper Brown. It’s a really easy story to slip into.

I enjoyed the fact that the characters are older. Willow is in her 20s and one of the younger cast members, while Juniper Brown is probably the oldest, a horror film stalwart. Because they are adults, they come with grown-up issues of living in the modern world, victims of cancel culture, social media addiction, online gambling addictions, and so on. Showing that adults are just as likely to be addicted to their phones as teenagers was a good facet of the story. Also, as everyone is unreliable, the real reasons they’ve come to camp are darker than the ones they’ve told the other campers, which come out throughout the novel, meaning there is a steady stream of reveals which lead to more questions. It’s very hard to put down.

While the book was fun, it wasn’t perfect. The ending felt a little rushed and too complex for the rest of the story. I can’t give away any details because half the fun was in trying to figure out who the killer was, but it reached a point where I was questioning how much more farfetched it could be. However, the same could be said for Scream, and that’s how I think of this book, like a page version of Scream, and when I finished, I was satisfied that the blurb and the cover delivered exactly what they’d promised.

As I’ve said, this book gives you exactly what it promises, so if you are looking for an adult slasher in the style of an 80s teen camp horror with contemporary life issues, then this is the book for you. I really enjoyed it, and Winning is definitely an author I’ll look out for.