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.

I first discovered Tananarive Due when I read The Reformatory a few years ago, and I knew right away that I’d found a new favorite author. When I read the synopsis for this one back when it was announced, I knew it would be right up my alley. I’m proud to say I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.

The book starts in the 1920s in Florida, where young Mazelle, known as Mazy, performs in her family’s traveling act. She makes a wish for a friend and gets a smelly, swamp-mud-scented dog named Scout who does everything Mazy asks. Scout leads her into the early days of silent film where she lands a role in a “Little Rascals”-esque series. But as she begins to age, Hollywood pigeonholes her to the stereotypical Black character and Hollywood’s racism problem becomes even more apparent. In the future, Johnny Washington is a filmmaker who’s trying to stay relevant in Hollywood and get past the horror franchise he’s known for. He’s also avoiding the legacy of his grandmother, Mazelle Washington. When he takes his family up to her mountain retreat that people used to call Mazywood, they find out something deadly is hiding there. Something his grandmother may be responsible for.

I love a horror or thriller set in a snowy landscape, so that elevated everything for me. People have said the book has a bit of a “The Shining” feel, and I definitely got that. The isolation. The snowstorm. A family trapped with a paranormal force. It’s a setting I love and will always devour, and even though it felt familiar, Due makes it her own and doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. The book is tense and engaging, and it kept me reading well past my bedtime. And, just like in The Reformatory, Due shows that the real horrors of racism are often just as scary as the monsters, if not more so. The creature in the story is frightening, but the way Mazelle and her family were boxed in and mistreated stayed with me longer.

As always, the characters are richly drawn, and I fell in love with Mazelle right away. Watching what she and her family went through in racist Hollywood wasn’t easy. I loved Johnny and his family, too. It was disheartening, though also true to life, that all those years later things still hadn’t gotten much easier for Black folks in Hollywood.

If you love snowed-in horror, richly drawn characters, and a story that doesn’t look away from real-world cruelty and inequality, pick this one up. I won’t be surprised if it ends up in my top 10 this year.

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