Mazywood
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Sept 22, 2026
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
All the Sinners Bleed meets Erasure in this literary thriller from the award-winning author of The Reformatory following the grandson of a famous Black actress who returns to his grandmother’s cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood.
When Johnny—a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington—brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.
Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever.
Now, fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried—and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Reformatory author Tananarive Due seamlessly blends historical fiction and supernatural horror in this spellbinding multi-generational tale. Mazelle Washington built a successful career as a Black actress in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1940s, even as the industry confined her to playing humiliating racist stereotypes. Generations later, her grandson Johnny is struggling with some of the same prejudices as a screenwriter when he brings his family to the secluded lodge near Mount Shasta that Mazelle left behind, where old family wounds take on terrifying new life. Moving between Mazelle’s rise in Hollywood and Johnny’s present-day ordeal, Due reveals how the staggering price Mazelle paid for success—from supporting her family as a child to enduring exploitation and abuse as her fame grew—created a monster that’s still haunting her descendants a century later. Both thoughtful and truly scary, Mazywood turns one family’s fight for survival into a haunting exploration of what can be passed from one generation to the next.
