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Book Review: The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

Quirk Books, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1683691532

Available: Hardcover, Kindle

 

The Remaking is a meta-supernatural thriller that follows a true crime paranormal case revived by various means every twenty years. The book starts in 1951, with the telling of a campfire tale, “Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek”, that occurred in the 1930s. For ten years, Jessica and her mother, Ella Louise, lived in the woods surrounding Pilot’s Creek, Virginia. They did not live within the town itself, since they were ostracized by the citizens of the town, as well as by their own family: Ella had no use for the societal game, and Jessica was born out of wedlock. Ella ran an apothecary from her cabin, and while the townspeople avoided the family in public, they were not above patronizing Ella when in need of a cure. But when a well-known customer died, Ella was immediately accused of witchcraft and both mother and daughter were burned at the stake. Because of the superstitions and paranoia of the townspeople, Jessica, thought to have magical abilities, was entombed in a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of white crosses.  Ella was buried in an unknown location.

In 1971, someone who was present at the telling of the campfire story has grown up to become a film director. He casts Amber Pendleton as Jessica in his horror movie. Amber’s overbearing mother thinks this will be a great opportunity for her, and make her a star. The tensions and stress on set drive Amber to run into the woods, where she comes face to face with something nobody believes happened. Fast forward to 1995, and Amber is trying to make ends meet by doing the horror convention circuit. A young, up-and-coming director with money approaches Amber to play the part of Ella in his remake of the film that cost her an early career. She reluctantly agrees. She becomes the star of her own witch hunt after something happens to the new Jessica actress on this set.

The book then switches to 2016, with a popular form of media, the true crime podcast. An enthusiastic, greedy, journalist hunts down Amber (who has, strangely enough, moved to Pilot’s Creek), to get her side of the story. Amber thinks telling her story might just be her best bet to redeem herself. Of course, there’s also a chance that it will just add to the neverending cycle of the nightmare of Jessica and Ella.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. An interesting aspect of the book for me was that it was always ambitious, heartless men at the core of each of the retellings of Jessica and Ella’s story. There was no heart in the development of the original film, nor the remake, only prestige and greed. Both directors were convinced that Jessica was demanding that her story be told, only to become so firm in their own vision that they missed the point. Amber immersed herself in both roles, and was chastised and abused for her intuitive reactions to her characters, first as the young Jessica, and in the remake as Ella Louise. She is blamed for creating her own drama and trauma, and ultimately put on actual trial for an incident that occurred during the filming of the remake. Then the podcaster aims to debunk the sightings of Jessica and Ella, as well as dig as much information out of Amber as he can to debunk that, too. Chapman’s characters and layout of the story are great. The Remaking is a fast and engaging read. I would recommend this for those who like true crime (it was based on the true story of a mother and daughter who were burned for being witches) and unique storytelling experiences. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on October 5, 2019 by , Reply

Graphic Novel Review: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness Volume 1 adaptation and artwork by Gou Tanabe, translation by Zack Davisson

H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, The First Volume adaption and artwork by Gou Tanabe, translated by Zack Davisson

Dark Horse, 2019

ISBN13: 978-1506710228

Available: Paperback, Kindle, comiXology

In this Cthulhu mythos tale, an expedition team from Miskatonic University headed by Professor William Dyer travels to Antarctica early in 1931. Lake, a member of the team, becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering the secrets of a rock sample they excavate early in their exploration. He leads a separate team to push forward to find more. They find looming black mountains, seemingly unnaturally formed caverns, and a complete zoological sample of a large creature that resembles a creature described in the famed Necronomicon housed at Miskatonic University. As scientists are wont to do, Lake dissects the specimen. The two camps had been communicating regularly via radio contact, but when Lake stops responding, Dyer and the rest of the team make the trek to Lake’s camp. When they arrive, however, they come across a grisly scene: the crew and sled dogs assigned to the camp are dead, and the bodies are mangled or dissected. The team also finds a star shaped mound of snow near the scene which turns out to contain an inhuman discovery. After recovering the remains of eleven bodies, they find that one of the members of Lake’s camp, Gedney, is missing.

Volume 1 of Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness is a beautiful and haunting version of this story. Tanabe’s artwork is an interesting and effective balance between the darkness of the caves and confined spaces to vast and breathtaking landscapes. A major difference, which I found to enhance the story, was that it was told from the point of view of both camps. The original was told from the perspective of only the main camp. This, combined with the added dialogue between the camps and artwork depicting the emotional reactions of the characters involved, created more of a sense of fear and foreboding than Lovecraft’s work. I can’t wait to see what Tanabe does with the continuation of this story in Volume 2. I would recommend this title for those who enjoy cosmic horror, manga from the horror genre, or different interpretations of Lovecraft (even those that he clearly based off of other works—in this case, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket). If you are a purist, this probably isn’t for you. Highly recommended.

 

Contains: corpses, dissected human body

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on October 2, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: Thoughts on Why There Aren’t More Male Protagonists in YA Horror

Over at Ginger Nuts of Horror, school librarian and YA dark fiction reviewer Tony Jones gave his thoughts on why there aren’t more strong male protagonists in current young adult dark fiction.  You should read his article first, because these are my thoughts after reading it. Tony knows a lot more than I do about YA horror, but Monster Librarian has been around since 2005 and I’ve read and written about a fair amount of YA and middle grade horror in that time period. Here’s a list of titles I put together in June, and as you can see, most of them are not very recent.

Tony suggests that the paranormal romance trend kicked off by Twilight at about that time turned a lot of boys off from reading horror, and I’m sure that was true,  at the time. In 2019, though, some teenagers might not even be aware of Twilight (quote from my daughter: “I’m not sure what it’s about. Doesn’t it have a black cover with a disembodied hand holding an apple?”). Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was a big name before Stephenie Meyer came along, and what kid knows her books now?  There were a couple of other trends that hit in the 2000s as well, the biggest one being Harry Potter. I will say that in 1999 I never would have guessed it would take of like it did, but Harry Potter has had an enduring effect on fantasy literature, complete with fearsome and bizarre creatures and terrifying sorcerers. That kind of fantasy quest fiction with a dark edge overwhemed a lot of the series horror popular in the 1990s with fantasy quest knockoffs. Tony brought up The Hunger Games as an influence, and we did start seeing a lot of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction around that time, with zombies becoming popular as well. There was more focus on relationships, and sometimes romance, but there were probably at least an equal number of zombie and dystopian titles with girls and boys as protagonists.

So what’s happening now that is different? Well, we’ve kind of moved through that fear of a far future apocalypse because it seems imminent, and the problems and fears kids are facing today have once again changed. And one of the ways they have changed is that the fears of girls, women, and other marginalized groups are taking up space that they didn’t before. and privilege has complicated the dynamic.  A lot of the books we see coming out have to do with agency being stolen, reproductive rights being limited, and things that are spinning out of control for people who already didn’t have much. With women writing most of YA horror, I’m guessing that’s where much of the horror lies.  Privilege is more complicated than just that, though, as evidenced by the clueless half-white, half Puerto Rican female protagonist from Vermont in her interactions with Puerto Rican residents in Five Midnights by Ann Cardinal Davila or wealthy Hanna and undocumented Nick in Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. It is possible to write characters of teenage boys with nuance, and as the mother of a teenage boy, I am desperate to see it.  The #OwnVoices movement, focused on finding and publishing diverse stories by diverse authors, especially in children’s and young adult literature, has also picked up some steam. Pitch Dark by Courtney Alameda is a great example of that, with both male and female point of view characters.

I agree with Tony that there are a lot of kids who skip straight from Goosebumps to Stephen King: in fact, research by Jo Worthy from more than 20 years back documents conversations between middle schoolers who do. In fact, teen readers are even likely to read and recommend adult fiction to their peers, if the “YA Council Recommends” shelves at my public library are any indication. At the same time, there are plenty of kids who don’t want to make that jump all at once. The Last Kids on Earth, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Captain Underpants  remain popular at the middle school level, and graphic novels of any kind are constantly checking out.  Rick Riordan’s quest narratives also stay popular, because they allow kids to gradually level up, with the first Percy Jackson series appropriate for elementary kids and the most recent series, Trials of Apollo, of interest even to adults. Riordan isn’t writing horror, although there are certainly horrific and gruesome elements in his work, as well as comedy and in-jokes. Even when Riordan has a male point of view character, though, we get to see the uncertainties and growth that take place in his protagonists– they aren’t stock characters. Kids devour those books– I have been hearing about the release of the newest one for what feels like eons now.

Back to those kids who skip over YA and go straight to the adult stuff: while lots of us may remember reading adult horror at a relatively young age, it probably wasn’t checked out from the school library. It’s not a recent thing that middle school libraries aren’t stocking Stephen King. If you headed over to the high school in my community, it looks like they have his complete collection, but while an informal poll I did awhile back showed that Gen Xers and millenials as young as 8 had read IT, that doesn’t mean they were getting it at their school library, or even that they’d want to, and definitely they are not finding in in the middle school collections here. Some books are “underground reading”, the kind that you want to pass around with your friends without actually telling the adults in your life about, and Stephen King, before he gained respectability, used to be one of those authors. Roland Smith writes “creature thriller” type books, such as the Cryptid Hunters series and others of his books, but there’s not much in YA horror that I can find for those who love the “man vs. nature” conflict. There doesn’t seem to be a Guy N. Smith for the YA crowd (if there is, I want to know). Those readers do really have to move on to the kinds of titles that used to be found in the horror sections of used bookstores.

 

Reading choices made by my 13 year old son: Anthony Horowitz (chosen but not read) Shadow Girl (read only at home) Chronicles of Elementia (his favorite book ever, at least on Monday) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Tony also discusses the gendering of book covers. It really is true that people judge books by their covers. Tony suggests that girls are more likely to pick up a book with a cover that is designed to appeal to boys than the other way around. That may be true in some cases, but I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Kids look for clues from book covers. I’ve got The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz sitting next to my sofa. It has a black cover with a shiny knife and a pencil on the front. The cover is what got my son to bring it home (not read it, but bring it home), and my daughter instantly backed away.  I also have a copy of Shadow Girl by Kate Ristau, which has an orange cover with a black silhouette of a girl on it. He read this one secretly (he even tried to hide it from me) but wouldn’t take it out of the house.  I feel like a lot of this is a cultural issue– that boys might be more likely to pick up books with girls on the cover if they didn’t think other kids would embarrass them for doing so.  It’s sad that boys and girls are shamed for things like the art on the book they’re reading.

There are many fewer male protagonists in YA horror, for sure. It would be great to see this disparity addressed, but as publishers work on increasing diversity I think this is something that is going to require thoughtful discussion in the YA literature community, as there is a feeling right now that publishing has been centering male protagonists and male authors for long enough. Rudine Sims Bishop writes that books should be both windows and mirrors, which is a great analogy, but Uma Krishnaswami takes it a step further and suggests that they can be prisms: not just showing an unfamiliar world or reflecting your own back exactly, but looking at things from a different perspective. I see this as the way that YA is going to have to move in order for boys to find themselves once again as heroes in horror fiction.

 

 

 

Posted on September 25, 2019 by , Reply
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