Mazywood

Award-winning author Tananarive Due returns with the follow-up to her national bestseller The Reformatory in this novel of generational rage.

Johnny Washington is a filmmaker striving for relevance within the Hollywood machine, beyond his horror film franchise. Johnny is also struggling against embracing the legacy his grandmother Mazelle Washington has left behind. This all comes to a head when he brings his family to her mountain retreat, a now-faded relic of old Black Hollywood once called Mazywood, which hides a deadly creature that threatens the lives of Johnny’s family.

In this thriller, Due deftly cuts between the present and the past, and we find Mazelle, billed as Mazy, the youngest daughter of a traveling Black family act based in Gracetown, Florida, in the 1920s. Mazy once made a wish for a friend, and that wish comes true in the form of a dog, a mutt she calls Scout the Wonder Dog, that always stinks like swamp mud and understands her like no other—almost as if Scout could read Mazelle’s mind.

With Scout, Mazy falls into the early days of silent filmmaking as a child actress. But the limitations for Black women in Hollywood keep Mazelle in a narrow box she will strain to escape the rest of her life.

With flashbacks to Johnny’s grandmother—who brushes shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel—this novel explores three generations of the Washington family. And fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny will discover the secret she had kept and nurtured at Mazywood.