Bram Stoker Award-winning author Hailey Piper turns cinema, lost media and grief into a cosmic horror story with her latest novel, This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want.
Perfect for fans of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Andrew Joseph White, the tale begins in November 1994, when three girls visit their local cinema to watch an obscure film. Only one of them is ever seen again.
Thirty years later, Val McQueen has tried to put the disappearance of her younger sister and best friend behind her, despite her parents’ resentment and the continued attention of true-crime enthusiasts. When a stranger’s murder brings the past back into focus, Val is forced to confront a terror she has spent years convincing herself was only a movie.
With the help of Roxie de la Fontaine, a former classmate and devoted cinephile, Val sets out to find the film. But their search soon reveals that they are not the only ones looking for it. Something connected to the movie is searching, too — and it hasn’t forgotten the girl who got away.
Piper is the acclaimed author of Queen of Teeth, A Game in Yellow, A Light Most Hateful and The Worm and His Kings series, as well as more than 120 short stories published in outlets including Weird Tales, Pseudopod and Dark Moon Digest.
In anticipation of the release of This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want (September 15), CinemaChords spoke to Piper about the novel’s “haunted movie” premise, the challenge of bringing the machinery of retro cinema horror into a world of smartphones, video cameras and the internet, and the curious afterlife of films once the technology that created them has been superseded.