MAZYWOOD

In the summer of 1926, a lonely little girl with monster talent and monster ambition submits a wish for her very own BFF and ends up with a…well, take a wild guess.

The movies are literally in Hollywood screenwriter/producer Johnny Washington’s DNA as the grandson of Mazelle Washington, a legendary Black actress from the 1920s to the ’40s, who, as with such comparably gifted peers as Hattie McDaniel, was consigned to playing comedic servant roles during the studio system’s golden age, which coincided with the beginning of the steep, too-slow decline of racially segregated Jim Crow America. Johnny, who’s been fighting his own uphill battles with racially blinkered studio mavens in today’s presumably more enlightened era, has inherited the frayed but cozy remnants of Bear Creek Lodge, a ski resort near Northern California’s Mount Shasta, which Mazelle owned and operated as a 1950s getaway spot for Black celebrities like Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., who, despite their star power, were shunned from similar establishments. Despite his fraught relationship with Mazy in her years of embittered semiretirement, Johnny appreciates being able to head to the mountains for rest and relaxation with his university professor wife, Tasha, and their teen daughters, Sharise and Imani. Both girls have, to varying degrees, inherited their grandmother’s energy and verve. Their mother, unbeknownst to them or their dad, is researching a book on Mazy’s tumultuous life. As they all settle in for what already seems a tense holiday amid the unrelenting Shasta snows, something big, strange, and scary lurks just beyond their immediate sight, leaving bizarre and alarmingly blood-soaked evidence of death and destruction. Through flashbacks masterfully woven throughout the novel by the redoubtable storyteller Due, this enthralling hybrid of showbiz history, supernatural mystery, and nail-biting adventure in the wild spins a chilling, enlightening, and ultimately heartrending saga of generational trauma, thwarted dreams, and familial devotion.

Simply stated, this feels perilously close to a career triumph for its author.