Mazywood is the latest novel by Tananarive Due, author of several standalone novels as well as the African Immortals series and is the coauthor of the Tennyson Hardwick novels. She also writes non-fiction and teaches a class at UCLA on Jordan Peele and the Black Horror Aesthetic.
First Thoughts
There comes a certain point in an author’s career when it seems like people become afraid to actually edit them. Due has won an American Book Award and multiple World Fantasy Awards, one for her latest novel, The Reformatory, and one for the short story Mazywood is based on. I can see why an editor would be tempted to err on the side of caution.
But I feel like this results in a novel that has a startling amount of detail about trekking through the woods and survivalism on the whole. Some of which I’m pretty sure are inaccurate. One point that has specifically been bugging me is that they spend a bit of time talking about the importance of finding a stream so they can have water, and they acknowledge they’ll have to boil it first. But if they’re boiling the water anyway, can’t they just use the snow that’s everywhere? I’m not an outdoorsman by any stretch of the imagination, am I missing something here?
Anyway, enough nitpicking. Let’s get to the main stories which, to be clear, are both intriguing and could be a movie in their own right. I say that because this book reads like it’s meant to be a movie. Although Due has yet to write a film script (as far as I know), she teaches film classes at UCLA and I get the feeling she is one of those people who really loves movies.
A Classic, Ominous Opening
Like many good horror stories, Mazywood opens with a little girl, Mazelle Washington, making a wish: “I wish I had a best friend forever. Someone to play with whenever I want. Who’ll love me better than anyone else. Who’ll keep me safe from anything bad. And I wish for my best friend to do shows with me, and we’ll have the best act in the whole world. Amen.”
Sounds like a good wish. Unfortunately, as she had been warned, wishes always try to trick you.
Almost immediately, Mazelle finds a dog on the side of the road who loves her and wants to be her friend. And he does tricks! Wish fulfilled, right? Since this is 1926, a dog that does tricks is all you need to become famous, so Mazy and Scout the Wonder Dog become a sensation and end up on an Our Gang knockoff about little kids who solve crimes. She’s the token Black character, and while her family isn’t thrilled about the stereotyping, she’s making good money, and they were a showbiz family before her father hurt his back.
One day, a few years later, Scout disappears, never to be seen again despite a nationwide search. This curtails Mazelle’s career for a while but the Mazy character is revitalized years later in a series of movies called Lazy Mazy. You can imagine how she feels about that, but once again she’s making good money, and meeting famous actors!
As I mentioned, Due teaches classes on Black filmmakers, so she clearly knows her stuff. Characters she’s made up are woven seamlessly with the likes of Hattie McDaniel and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Mazelle eventually opens a ski lodge catering to Black Hollywood, originally called Mazywood but, wanting to move away from the character, she eventually changes the name to Bear Creek Lodge.
Fast Forward to the Present Day
Mazelle’s grandson, Johnny Washington, also works in Hollywood but as a writer, not an actor. He’s relatively famous as the mind behind Frat House Haunting, a teen slasher that spawned several sequels, even though they were never what he really wanted to be writing. Now that he’s established, he wants to make the movies that he wants to make, although the studios are still skeptical.
He also has two teenage daughters, one of whom is heading off to college soon, and his wife just found out she’s pregnant with a baby that neither of them seems to want (although they’ve each convinced themselves the other does). And his wife is kind of obsessed with Hollywood legend Mazelle Washington, whom Johnny knows only as his abusive grandmother. They take a family trip to Bear Creek Lodge (which Johnny legally owns but hasn’t spent time at since Mazelle died when he was a child) to tell the girls about the new baby, and kind of reconnect as a family before Sharise goes off to college.
There are a lot of setups for family tension and metaphorical or literal ghosts. Due actually references The Shining several times, so it would be reasonable to assume that this part of the story will be something like an homage. Ghosts, or one of the family members going slowly mad and trying to murder someone else. This is not what happens. Was it an intentional red herring or does Due just like to talk about The Shining? Who can say? But it did leave me a little confused and disappointed.
The Washington family actually spends very little time in the main house of the lodge before the book becomes a survivalist horror story where the teenage girls are slogging through the snow, being hunted by a literal monster in the woods.
Final Thoughts
To me, writing about the horrors of the past, memories, abusive families, fear of the future, and racism would have been enough. I feel like the monster would have worked better in the short story, which I tried to find online to no avail, but in a full-length novel it is an unnecessary element.
To be clear, this is not a review of Tananarive Due as a person, or her work on the whole. This is the only book of hers I’ve read, and it’s believable that the things I didn’t like about it are the kind of things that her readers enjoy.
All told, I feel like it’s a safe bet that this is not Tananarive Due’s best novel, but it does make me want to dig deeper into her catalog.