Heads Will Roll
Willow had a sitcom, a following, and a career. Then she posted something she cannot take back, drank her way into a swimming pool in front of a phone camera, and became a punchline. Her agent's solution is Camp Castaway — an adults-only retreat in the woods of upstate New York, marketed as a digital detox for the publicly disgraced. Campers surrender their phones at the gate, take assumed names, and spend their days in group therapy and yoga under the eye of Bebe, the camp's brisk and unsmiling den mother. Nobody asks what anyone did to end up there. Everybody knows anyway.
The other guests are a gallery of the recently cancelled: Dani, a burnt-out writer; Chef Jeff, who keeps to himself; and Juniper Brown, a horror-movie legend and Willow's childhood hero. On the first evening, around the campfire, the group is told about Knock-Knock Nancy — a local woman beheaded in this forest, whose ghost is said to knock on cabin doors after dark and take the head of whoever answers.
It is a good story, and Willow does not believe a word of it. Then a camper walks into the trees and does not walk back out. A mutilated doll appears in Willow's cabin with a message rolled up inside its mouth. And at night, from the other side of the door, someone starts knocking.
Josh Winning, the author of Burn the Negative and The Shadow Glass, writes a slasher that takes cancel culture seriously enough to be very funny about it — a camp full of people who have all done something they would rather not explain, cut off from help by the very thing they came here to escape.
A sitcom actress cancelled over a single post, shipped off to Camp Castaway by her agent to sit out the fallout.
The camp's campfire legend: a woman beheaded in these woods, said to knock on doors after dark and take the head of whoever answers.
A veteran horror-film actress and Willow's childhood hero, now a fellow camper.
The camp's stern den mother, who runs the group therapy sessions and the yoga.
A jaded writer among the campers.
This is a standalone story and does not require knowledge of the author's previous works, such as Burn the Negative or The Shadow Glass, to follow the plot.
Josh Winning is a long-time film journalist and senior writer for Radio Times who has spent over a decade covering cinema, which informs the meta-horror elements and slasher tropes utilized throughout the narrative.