The Remaking by Clay McLeod Chapman

I've read and quite enjoyed Chapman's books, but I started with his recent ones. Now that our library finally got a copy of his debut, I was able to indulge the completist in me and check it out.
Well ... first of all, it's interesting to see the evolution of Chapman as a writer. And he has improved quite a bit.
The Remaking shows promise and potential, but its choppy repetitiveness leaves a lot to be desired. It works nicely in beefing up the page count, since the author frequently employs tricks like one-line paragraphs. And this is for sentences that often do not need such distinctions. There's also a lot of excess emphasis and reinteractions.
I suppose there's no second of all. The strength lies in the plot, which involves witches and movie making, and a rather nifty way to combine the two. For this, the narrative jumps a couple of decades or so for each part of the story, which may or may not work for some readers, but is conceptually interesting.
Overall, not the author's best. Reads quickly due to the aforementioned low word-per-page density. Probably shouldn't be one's introduction to Chapman as his writing has gotten much smoother since. A success of his own remaking, one might say ;)