Tananarive Due's striking novel Mazywood blends historical Black Hollywood with a horror story involving family legacies and the power of a wish.
Readers meet Mazelle Washington as a little girl in 1926. The lonely youngest in a family of Black stage performers, Mazelle ventures into the woods, to the locally famous Wishing Pool, where she asks for a forever friend. She forgets to say she wants her friend to be human--but when a charming, scruffy white dog turns up, she loves him like no one else. With Scout by her side doing tricks, Mazelle becomes the darling of silent film comedy. Throughout her long career in Hollywood, however, Mazelle faces racism, sexual harassment, and other more personal struggles.
Mazelle's narrative thread sees her into the 1980s and runs alongside a 2020s timeline in which Mazelle's grandson, Johnny Washington, a director of horror films, works in an industry still wrestling with stereotypes. In an upheaval, Johnny takes his wife and two daughters for their first visit to his family inheritance: Mazelle's ski lodge in the mountain forests of northern California. Even with his own grim memories of the place, Johnny is unprepared for the terrors that await them there.
Due (The Reformatory) expertly interlaces these two narratives, one rooted in historical detail, with cameos by Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., the other neatly focused on 21st-century family dynamics and the development of two strong, nuanced adolescent girls. Drama, history, and bloodcurdling fear combine for a thriller that is smart, monster-ridden, and moving. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia