Literacy 2025: Book 23: Heads Will Roll

Book
Heads Will Roll by Josh Winning

Synopsis
The star of the popular sitcom We Love Willow has been canceled for a careless message she posted on Twitter. Now she’s lost her job, her fiance, her home, and on top of all the vitriol she’s receiving from the press and online, she’s getting personal death threats. She checks herself into a retreat in a secluded area of upstate New York, a kind of summer camp for cutting off from the outside world, with a strict policy of no phones or any electronic devices. But there’s a local urban legend about a woman who was decapitated by a priest and still stalks these woods, looking for revenge and hoping to find herself a replacement head. When guests start disappearing from the camp without a trace, it seems that the legend might have inspired a real-life killer!

Notes
This one is squarely in summer-reading category, and it has zero pretense of being anything other than an early 2000s-era self-aware slasher movie in book form. It is relentless with its references both to movies and to social media and internet culture in general — maybe not Ready Player One-level relentless, but still often distractingly so.

I was a little surprised to see how hard it goes in its anti-cancel culture statement. It’s a sentiment I ultimately agree with — because it makes a point of distinguishing between actual campaigns for accountability like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, with the gossip-driven bullshit hate campaigns that are usually passed off as being righteous for “punching up” — but it was still odd to see a book like this taking such a hard stand.

Also, and this is a very mild spoiler, but we do eventually find out what was in the tweet that got our protagonist canceled, and it was almost laughably harmless. The idea that something so innocuous could result in such a hate campaign was less believable than anything about the murders.

As for the slasher story: it’s fine. It’s engaging and readable, and it’s vaguely nostalgic, which is exactly what the target audience for this kind of book is going to be looking for. I switched to this after abandoning a “better” book that I’d been trying to slog through for a couple of weeks, and it was nice to just jump back into a story that had me curious as to how it all ends. Everything does end up fitting together, even if it’s not in a particularly surprising or even satisfying way.

Verdict
Definitely more along the lines of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer than Scream, but it’s a pretty quick and easy read, and it does deliver on the modern slasher movie vibes.