Remakes and Resurrections

This one time I wore a blue cape to teach my English composition class–you read that right–and as my students all fell silent to add the “so what” to their thesis statements as instructed, I heard one woman whisper, “You look like a Black Snow White.” Another whispered back, “No! She looks like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” In the sitcom version of this story, I leap onto the podium and announce “I AM DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT.” In real life, however, because I cared a lot about that job, I just grinned wildly because even though there are MANY new stories being greenlit, this generation is one of remakes… and despite my ambivalence, a horror story retold or re-imagined, especially for inclusion, is the bomb.

(I should mention that I am neither Black, nor white, nor Iranian, as my students’ comparisons implied, but as an Arab person in the south, sometimes these ethnically ambiguous representations are as close as we get. Case in point: my unbridled childlike enthusiasm of Tom Cruise’s remake of The Mummy featuring A GIRL MONSTER WHO ONLY WANTED POWER, and then, of course, immediate disappointment that the narrative was literally and inexplicably hijacked by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde… this is why we can’t have nice things: Tom Cruise.)

So with no further preamble, this is The Fright Stuff, Book Riot’s weekly newsletter about the latest and greatest in horror. I’m Mary Kay McBrayer, and I’ll be your Virgil through this circle of hell, the remake.

The Thing about Hell is It’s Eternal (FKA, I meshed “new releases” with “backlist classics” because that is the nature of the remake)

The Turning by Henry James

This collection was re-released in tandem with the upcoming fill The Turning, based loosely on “The Turn of the Screw” and ghost stories by Henry James. This Christmas ghost story (never too late, always the season, et cetera) is one narrative that founded the motif of, Is it a ghost, or is it a hallucination? If not being able to trust your own mind wasn’t scary enough, it also has evil kids involved, which, as you might remember, is the worst kind of scary for me personally.

The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

If you haven’t already picked up this novel, I need you to go ahead and do it. Though this book is not a remake itself, it does focus on remakings as a trope of our generation, and how the subjects of those horror stories do. not. like. that. It makes total sense that a witch and her daughter would haunt the shit out of anyone who misrepresented their story, right? I mean, I would do that, given the chance.

Medusa’s Daughters by Theodora Goss

If you like the Gothic, and I assume you do, because here you find yourself, you’re gonna love these showcase pieces from various female authors during the fin de siècle. Theodora Goss, Victorianist and author of horror and speculative fiction books, edits these long-lost and long-loved stories and poems. You’re gonna love it!

 

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Edited by Carmen Maria Machado

If you’re making a list about remade horror, you can’t NOT include Carmen Maria Machado’s edit of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novella–not only is it easier to read than the original translation, but its footnotes and introduction frame it in a way that you’ve never seen before.

 

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

I guess technically most people wouldn’t classify The Odyssey as horror, but hot damn does it have a ton of monsters and murder and war to not be scary af. Not to mention the 12 maids of Penelope that Odysseus and Telemachus hang to death for consorting and conspiring with the suitors… so, maybe Odysseus wouldn’t have considered the mass murder of the suitors horror, but Penelope does, and this re-envisioning of the Classic myth, told in both verse and prose, depicts the perspective of the wise yet vulnerable Penelope. Just wait until she runs up on her maids in the Underworld. Or when she runs into Helen.

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

Though the title suggests this novel–Oyeyemi’s first, in fact–would reimagine the story of the boy flying too close to the sun, this book deals more with the hyphenated identity (Nigerian-English) of a little girl, Jess. When she falls into uncontrollable screaming fits, her mother takes her to Nigeria for a visit. The book more-so remakes the idea of the doppelgänger or double, because when Jess meets her new friend Tillytilly, playdates get real scary.

News:

A monument honoring reporter Nellie Bly is coming to New York.

Forget a solid gold toilet–in the 18th century, toilets and entire bathrooms were designed to look like books.

And don’t forget about this forgotten Subway entrance, the historical marker of the Shakespeare Riots, which were a real thing.

In case you want to know about cursed films, a documentary series on many of them (directed by Jay Cheel) will debut at SXSW! And if you’re not going to that festival, it will be on Shudder soon afterward!

Stephen King has clarified his Tweet about diversity and quality, in case you haven’t heard.

Want to know the real killer who inspired the play, Arsenic and Old Lace? Here you go.

The Edgar Allan Poe House is Maryland’s first literary landmark.

The Romantic poets made punny nicknames for each other… and Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth.”

Are you, too, tired of coffeehouses that don’t look like Victorian Bordellos? Then you should check out the Raven Cafe in Port Huron, Michigan.

And see about this project, Women in Translation, which is translating horror literature!

If I missed important things, don’t forget to get at me (or follow me) on Twitter @mkmcbrayer or Instagram @marykaymcbrayer. And if you need more literary reads, check out Book Riot’s new podcast that I co-host with LH Johnson, Novel Gazing. Until next week, y’all be careful about whose stories you tell, and how you tell them.

Your Virgil,

 

Mary Kay