Mazywood is two novels sharing one spine, and one of them is plainly better. The other is still good.
Start in 1929. Mazelle Washington is nine, she brings home a stray dog named Scout, and the dog dances. Her parents see an act. Lorenzo Studios, home of the show Li'l Gumshoes, sees a child star. A career that will run through Hollywood's Golden Age begins there, and so does a wish Mazelle made as a girl and never stopped hiding. Jump to the present. Her grandson Johnny Washington writes slashers, the Frat House Haunting franchise among them, and can't get anyone to fund anything more serious. He drives Tasha and their two teenagers to Bear Creek Lodge on Mount Shasta, the property Mazelle left him and the one this book is named for. Something happened to Johnny there when he was a boy. He has not made peace with it.
The Hollywood half is the one to beat. Mazelle works alongside Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne and Clark Gable, and Due lets them banter like people instead of cameos, with Gone with the Wind somewhere in the frame. The glamour is real. So is the bill: typecasting, predatory bosses, harassment, an industry that will take her talent and wants nothing else from her. The research shows on every page. Under it all sits a lonely girl who wants one thing that is hers, and the book takes that loneliness somewhere a lot worse than sad. The studio system is the first horror here, and it is the more convincing one. There is a fair complaint, though. A major turn in Mazelle's arc arrives fast, and a chapter or two more of in-between would have helped it land. A later chapter patches some of the gap.
The present-day thread handles the creature. Mazelle built the lodge as a refuge, a place where she and her friends could stay when hotels turned them away, so watching it become a hunting ground for her descendants has a nasty irony. Johnny makes horror for a living, which lets the book toss off nods to The Shining and Candyman without strain. The woods are cold, the dread is steady, and the family is likable enough that the danger costs something. Readers say they couldn't call where it was headed until roughly two thirds of the way in. Some of those chapters still feel thin beside the history, and a few readers wanted to skip ahead to get back to Hollywood. Others found them so tense they had to set the book down.
Why you should read
- Horror built on real history
- Old Hollywood stories with Black performers at the center
- Dual-timeline novels with a creature feature in the present
- Family secrets and generational trauma
- Long, character-driven supernatural fiction
What to expect
- Two timelines with very different tones
- The Hollywood chapters carry the most weight
- A slow-building, isolated mountain-lodge siege
- A long book that sags a little near the end
- Real stars like Hattie McDaniel and Lena Horne as characters
It runs 512 pages, and the last stretch feels the length. The ending, though, stays loyal to the wish that opens everything. Whether the secret at the center satisfies depends on what you expected it to be, but nothing about it is a cheat. Mazelle wanted company in a town that took everything else from her. Mazywood is the invoice.
