Tananarive Due is not just one of our finest horror writers, but one of our finest horror thinkers, and those things don’t always go hand-in-hand. There’s always a chance that someone who knows the genre inside and out and can analyze it with an expert’s eye will freeze up in the headlights of creation, overthink their work, and lean too hard on cold, academic wisdom instead of visceral thrills.
That’s never happened with Due’s fiction. Instead, the celebrated author, teacher, podcaster, and more wields her vast knowledge to build novels like cathedrals, layering meaning and wit and depth into a story that’s also a thumping horror yarn. Due’s latest, Mazywood, is exactly that kind of book, melding the history of Black Hollywood with an unforgettable monster story to create one of the year’s must-read genre books.
The “Mazywood” of the title takes its name from Mazelle Washington, a Black Hollywood legend who started performing as a child on the stage with her parents, and soon grew beyond her family act. As the title character in a series of comedies centered on a stereotypical character named “Lazy Mazy,” Mazelle built fame and fortune, but as with so many Black actors in Hollywood’s Golden Age, the more substantive roles were always just out of reach, and her legacy was marred by compromise, trauma, and regret.
Jump ahead to the present day, and Mazelle’s grandson, Johnny, is dealing with compromises and regrets of his own. A writer and director best known for creating a well-worn horror franchise, Johnny dreams of more ambitious, fresher projects, only to be shut down in meeting after meeting. Frustrated and in need of a getaway, he decides to take his wife Tasha and his two daughters, Imani and Sharise, out to the mountains for a stay at Mazelle’s legendary retreat, Bear Creek Lodge. Once a haven for Hollywood’s best and brightest, the former resort is now simply an old family property, and represents a chance for the Washingtons to have a snowy vacation away from the Hollywood machine.
But Johnny’s memories of Bear Creek aren’t the happiest, and the longer he and his family stay in the old lodge, the more he starts to realize that while Mazelle is long dead, something else is still alive on the property. And it’s hunting them.
Across nearly 500 pages, Due’s narrative weaves in and out of past and present, telling the generations-long story of a bargain that was once struck and the ripples it’s still sending through the Washington family. In the past, we meet Mazelle as a girl with an uncanny talent, watch her rise in Hollywood, see her build her mountain retreat and welcome everyone from Clark Gable to Sammy Davis Jr. into her life.
In the present, Johnny and his wife and daughters are plunged into a nightmare as a monster stalks their vacation home, something inexplicable and strangely intelligent and connected to decades-old family secrets. These parallel stories each run with their own particular cadence, and yet the emotional resonance of the entire book binds them, unites them. With Due’s knowledge of Hollywood history and her own experiences in the modern development grind built into the narrative, Mazywood takes on a depth that allows the reader a chance to get lost in another world not too far from our own.
The dual narrative threads also allow Due to show off her versatility as a horror novelist, because while Mazelle and Johnny’s story are of course part of one larger narrative, they each carry a different flavor. Mazelle’s narrative is a tale of dark bargains, Hollywood compromises, sleazy executives, and, eventually, confronting her own inner darkness. Johnny’s narrative is pure survival horror, a monster movie in the snow complete with excavations of old family traumas and a search for the truest version of his own history. Together they make for one ferociously scary book, but the fear isn’t the only thing knitting the story into one family saga epic.
Mazelle Washington and her descendants are all storytellers of some kind or another. Johnny’s a filmmaker, Tasha wants to write a book about Mazelle’s life, and even Imani and Sharise are beginning to experiment with their own grasp of legacy, creating their futures as they dig into their pasts. By linking these family members together with a shared interest not just in their story, but in all stories, Due crafts a novel about the power and importance of owning your narrative, and the horror that comes when you realize someone else has taken it from you.
Even the title, Mazywood, refers to what Mazelle once named her lodge, in the days before she decided to rechristen it something that made more sense to the person she became. All of these ideas merge seamlessly with the propulsive thrills of the horror narrative, making Mazywood not just a book you’ll want to read, but a book you’ll want to read over and over again.
Mazywood is now available wherever books are sold.
