The pines at your back? You can practically feel the needles bristling in the wind. Lean in and listen closely and you’ll hear their stories. Everything that’s ever happened underneath that vast canopy of conifers. Every last romantic tryst. The suicides. The lynchings. You name it. These trees will testify to them.
These woods have witnessed it all.
— first paragraph
Evoking the mesmerizing seediness of low-budget horror movies like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, The Remaking opens on a drunken man telling a campfire story about a witch and her daughter, a story based on events in Pilot’s Creek in the 1930s when he was around the age of one of his listeners. Ella Louise, a community outcast, made potions townsfolk bought on the sly. When one potion is believed to have been harmful, several men no longer suffer a witch, or her witch-daughter.
Cut and … forty years later …
One of the boys by the campfire has grown up. Captivated by the campfire tale, he decides to make a movie based on the growing urban legend of the witch and her daughter. A young girl, Amber, is hired to play Jessica, the daughter, herself rumored to have had greater power than her mother and the role becomes consuming. Filming begins in the graveyard where the real Jessica is buried, the woods around a backdrop to the filming and the site of the mother’s grave, though no one knows just where it is, and events around the filming grow darker as the spirit of Jessica seems to assert itself.
Cut to 1990s …
The 1970s horror movie, “Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave” was a cheap, sensationalistic movie that should have disappeared without leaving a memory, but its transference to VHS tape and the stories surrounding its production combine with the power of its depiction of the little witch girl to transfix a new generation of viewers. An emerging young director, a fan with a big budget, tracks down the actress who played Jessica in the original as his good luck charm and starts a remake for the ’90s audience. And so back to Pilot’s Creek, the cemetery, the woods and the influence of Jessica seems once again asserting itself.
Cut and … 2016 …
A man whose podcast debunks urban legends digs into the truth behind the legend of the little witch girl and the cult status of the first movie and the famously unfinished remake plagued with tragedy. The woman associated with both productions knows more than she’s telling and he’ll dig it out of her.
The Remaking is an entertaining ghost story revolving around an unjustly killed little witch girl uneasy in her grave, and supposedly based on a true story. It also takes a somewhat jaundiced look at low-budget film making – Chapman’s back flap biography mentions some low-budget movies for which he wrote scripts – without quite becoming satire. Both aspects make the novel reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project without blatantly lifting anything from that movie besides atmospherics. In the process, Chapman puts the woods of his North Carolina setting to good, creepy effect (a setting which again evokes The Blair Witch Project). In spite of all that happens, little Jessica and her mother become sympathetic, if frightening, creations.
There are bumps along the way. First, the format of the above quotation, a paragraph of exposition followed by a hard clincher statement dropped into its own line, is beat to death in the first two sections. This is an old pulp tactic that works well in short stories and small doses, but used over and over early on eschews subtlety, ramps up portentousness and becomes tiring. Fortunately Chapman doesn’t use it as extensively in later sections. Second, and maybe not a fair criticism, while Chapman taps into how story travels, dispersing and reinventing itself, that effect is narrowed to a small group of characters; he says many fans are affected but doesn’t really indicate what there is about the urban legend that inspires fans to act as carrier and transmitter. Why this story? How does it resonate among a generation that didn’t really believe in witches? By keeping his cast small and intimate, Chapman ramps up suspense, but only brushes against what urban legends mean to the people who hold, nurse and communicate them.
Those criticisms aside, Chapman’s accomplishment is about on par with another first novel ghost story, Joe Hill’s, Heart-Shaped Box. Neither is a masterpiece, but both are solidly told and enjoyable, and just maybe The Remaking, like Hill’s novel, is an indication of more powerful work to come.
The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman
Quirk Books, October 2019
320 pages
ISBN: 978-1683691570
Review by Randy Money
