This Movie Doesn’t End The Way We Want by Hailey Piper

This Movie Doesn’t End The Way We Want is a horror novel about a woman whose sister and best friend disappeared at a movie theater as children. Val is estranged from her parents who blame her for her sister and lives haunted by the strange film she watched all those years ago. After Val stumbles across someone dead, she finds herself facing the memories of the past as she tries to work out how the film works, helped by a former classmate who hunts down lost media as a job.

This book is a fun take on the cursed media genre, quite self-aware of how that genre is centred around online video these days and the fact that there’s actually a lot of work (and people) that go into making a film. There’s also a lot around character, particularly Val’s relationships with other people and how her parents let her down after the disappearance of her sister. There were some elements that could have maybe done with a bit more detail, particularly during the climax of the plot, but I liked how the story ended up hazy and surreal in places (a style which ironically often works better in horror films than books).