The Remaking
A Novel
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From Clay McLeod Chapman, “the twenty-first century’s Richard Matheson” (Richard Chizmar), comes an “original and chilling” (Buzzfeed) ghost story that follows the legend of the Witch Girl of Pilot’s Creek as it evolves every twenty years—with haunting results.
In the 1930s, Ella Louise and her daughter Jessica are dragged from their home at the outskirts of Pilot’s Creek, Virginia. Ella Louise is accused of witchcraft, and both are burned at the stake. Ella Louise’s burial site is never found, but the little girl has the most famous grave in the South: a steel-reinforced coffin surrounded by a fence of interconnected white crosses.
But if the mother was the witch, why was the little girl’s grave so tightly sealed?
This question fuels a legend told around a campfire in the 1950s by a man forever marked by his encounters with Jessica. Twenty years later, a boy at that campfire will cast Amber Pendleton as Jessica in a ’70s horror movie inspired by the ghost story. Amber’s experiences on the set and its ’90s remake will ripple through pop culture, ruining her life and career after she becomes the target of a witch hunt.
Now, Amber’s best chance to break the cycle of horror comes when a popular true-crime investigator tracks her down for an interview. But will this final act of storytelling redeem her—or will it bring the story full circle, ready to be told once again?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Remaking reads like mystical folklore come frightfully to life. In Depression-era Virginia, local pariah Ella Louise and her young daughter, Jessica, are the victims of a small-town witch hunt that soon becomes a local ghost story. Decades later, former child actress Amber Pendleton is haunted by her experience starring as Jessica in a low-budget drive-in horror movie based on the story. When the host of a true-crime podcast invites Amber to be on his show, she sees a chance to shake her demons at last—or is she cursed to live with the ghosts of humanity’s evils? Pick up this book for a deliciously frightening horror story filled with fascinating, lived-in characters.