The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman
I would like to thank Jamie-Lee Nardone and Quirk Books for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Quirk Books
Published – Out Now
Price - £6.83 Kindle eBook £9.99 paperback
From Campfire story to 70’s Horror Flick to 90’s Meta Remake to True Crime Podcast
Ella Louise has lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, for nearly a decade. Publicly, she and her daughter Jessica are shunned by her upper-crust family and the local residents…. Accused of witchcraft, both mother and daughter are burned at the stake in the middle of the night. Ella Louise’s brutal site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South - a steel re-enforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses.
Their story will take the shape of an urban legend as it’s told around a campfire by a man forever marked by his boyhood encounters with Jessica. Decades later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a 70’s horror movie inspired by the Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek. Amber’s experiences on that set and its meta-remake in the 90’s will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt.
Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a true-crime investigator tracks her down to interview her for his popular podcast. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her – or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again? And again. And again…
Last night I watched the 1931 edition of Dracula; loosely based around the 1927 play of Dracula and of course that is based on the 1897 novel. Look backwards you’ll see the Vampire myth in many forms prior to Stoker’s interpretation and of course post Bela’s performance we have seen myriad other incarnations of the tale from Lee to Langella to Oldman et al. Stories and plots rarely die forever. Part of that is any good story itself is compelling; speaks to a human need possibly to warn us or inspire us. But also this can be seen that our appetite to remake and further remake is our capacity to just consume the same thing relentlessly without question of the material. In Clay McLeod Chapman’s stunning and disturbing novel, The Remaking we watch the evolution of a myth exploding across multiple formats for eighty years and see the tale consume the people forced to retell it.
For this story you will get four tales for the price of one. In the first tale we get a 1951 retelling of the story that itself started in 1931 (and this actually is an urban legend itself). An old man in exchange for a bottle tells us of how Ella Louise Ford; a fallen member of a rich family then lived in the woods with her daughter Jessica effectively becoming the town’s local apothecary (and some would say witch). Chapman captures the feel of an old-style horror tale – you can feel this one being narrated as you read it in the man’s voice and localisms. It’s a gruesome yet darkly magical tale. Ella Louise is someone not quite part of the normal world in how she is described and yet the tale also shows human cruelty and the telling of their deaths is disturbing and haunting as is the suspicion there was supernatural revenge afterwards.
Then we move to 1971 and we see the world through 9-year-old Amber Pendleton’s bewildered eyes. We are in Hollywood and Amber is a young child actress with a fierce mother keen to achieve her own dreams of fame. Amber is up for the role of Ella Louise’s dead daughter in the shlock horror production ‘Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave’ where the tale will be told of a standard group of hippies taking drugs and having a graveyard orgy (naturally) that will then lead to Jessica’s return to wreak bloody revenge. On the one hand this tale captures the grindhouse cinema where directors with vison rammed heads with producers with cash and a desire for films that sell. You can see the type of movies this film will slot into, but the truly unsettling thing is when we enter Amber’s point of view. Amber is not really into being a star and is doing this to please her mother and then the film’s director. She never feels comfortable and particularly when she is made up in plastic and latex as the burned corpse of Jessica, she can feel herself being pulled into those woods. There is a brilliant sense of build up as we realise that Amber has been swept up into a much larger legend and in those scenes it’s not shlock horror it’s eerie, cold and frightening…
The third tale takes us to 1995. This tale is exclusively through the now adult Amber’s eyes. The incidents of the original film made it a notorious VHS success and Amber became both a minor celebrity and also the prisoner of a role that consumed her. But in the 90’s the meta remake boom is beginning and precocious young director who the studio adores and who fell in love with the original movie has announced he wants to remake it with Amber in the role of Ella awaiting to be reunited with her daughter. This is possibly my favourite segment. It explores fandom’s obsession with stars – Amber cannot move onto other roles as people just see her continually as a 9-year-old monster from a bad horror movie that is weirdly compelling. We see the toll on her partly through fans at a convention who continually see a star as a piece of property (and even the remake’s director seems to just have Amber around as a prize from his favourite movie) to the effects Hollywood had on young stars – drugs to give or remove an edge; alcoholism and financial worries. I really like Amber being both a sympathetic character and one we feel very worried about as she returns to the scene of a childhood nightmare. It moves from Hollywood expose to a sense that Amber is once again in something’s sights and this time the consequences will be tragic. There is a looming sense of something approaching a climax and again we move from teen horror to something a lot more chilling.
The final segment moves us to 2016 and this time Horror/Crimes newest frontier - podcasts! Nathaniel is our main narrator the ambitious and sceptical maker of Who Goes There? A podcast keen to debunk any urban legend and in the Little Witch Girl’s tale we have small town mystery combined with the tragic histories of its film versions he has a story that he wants to finally get to the truth of. The now reclusive Amber living in a trailer park has been rarely seen after the events of 1995. I loved again the step change in approach – here we get a very informal and also sound focused narration as he wanders the dying town of Pilot’s Creek and its hostile inhabitants– you could easily imagine how this would feel listening through your headphones similar to say Lore or Serial. But here we also get to see Nathaniel’s hidden persona – greedy; judgemental and looking to use Amber for his own reward. Again, we get that sense that Amber is being summoned for another trip to the woods but we also that this story never really dies from campfire warning to future podcast best seller. In each segment we see a man using the legend and Amber for their own personal reward. None of them want to use the truth of two people murdered out of hatred they just want to make the women the monsters to fed stories for profit. A tale as old as Medusa? But once again those woods are beckoning, and Nathaniel may be surprised at the outcome.
I think this is a fascinating intelligent and eerie read. Chapman clearly loves horror and its history but is also aware of its darker side in exploitation; fan entitlement and that sense of consuming a story unquestioning forever. I really liked how it interrogates the motives of the traditionally male storytellers and their treatment of women – onscreen and offscreen (an issue not limited to horror). That dissection of horror itself is refreshing but Chapman also manages to make each segment itself a compelling ghost tale and when read in sequence we enter a really epic myth that feels to be ever so slowly sucking everyone into it. Horror should be for life not just for Halloween and this would be a perfect tale to read in the dark nights of winter and also give you food for thought the next time you see a remake announced.
