Heads Will Roll -Josh Winning

Information

• Goodreads: 3.81 out of 125 Ratings
• Age Category: Adult
• Genre: Horror; Thriller
• Series: None

Summary

Cancel culture is back at it in this book, but taken to a bit of an extreme.

Willow has experienced her worst nightmare: being canceled after a tweet, therefore being fired from her job, losing her fiancé, and having her life generally just fall to complete shit. There’s only one thing to do when you’re being canceled and receiving hate mail – and death threats: go to a secluded camp in the middle of the woods that doesn’t allow cell phones, obviously. Unfortunately, there’s someone here who takes cancel culture quite literally and people very quickly begin to lose their heads.

Review

Listen, I love to go camping. It can be so nice and fun. No one can argue that it doesn’t feel good to disconnect from our devices and reconnect with nature. It absolutely makes sense in my noggin that a character going through what Willow is going through would be tempted with an opportunity to just let it all go. But without a phone? You could never catch me doing that. I know, I know. The point of the camp is to disconnect from devices, I get it. I’m all for it. But you aren’t gonna catch me not having my phone so that I can call 911 if I needed to.

Despite this silly move on everyone’s end, I was expecting the atmosphere to be phenomenal. I was expecting it to be creepy. It wasn’t. There were some spooky aspects. I would be fucking terrified if someone was randomly knocking my on door three times at night. Something about it just didn’t click for me, though. Maybe it was the characters. None of them really had much to them to keep me interested.

It felt like Josh was trying to have a conversation about cancel culture, but I didn’t feel as I, personally, got anything from it. We all know that cancel culture can absolutely suck and a lot of people don’t deserve as much of the backlash as they get. I, for one, feel as though we should hold people accountable when it’s necessary. The book seems to take on the message that no cancel culture is good and there’s always something worse that someone is doing – such as murder. And I could get behind that, if we weren’t using the most bland and irritating character to show that. Willow isn’t even her real name. She’s an actor who has lost her job due to tweeting – in character – about the LGBTQ community. She meant the tweet in good faith, being part of the community herself, but it wasn’t taken that way. But maybe she wouldn’t be in this situation if she didn’t talk and tweet as if she were that character. Or maybe I just really didn’t like her, I’m not sure. I don’t feel as if this is something Josh has done wrong, I’ve liked his writing before. This just didn’t hit. It’s marketed as adult but, good god, does it read like cheesy YA. I just didn’t have a good time with this one. Whomp, Whomp.

I’m curious, if you’ve read it, what did you think? Did you have similar critiques as I did or did you find yourself enjoying the characters? Let me know!