Tananarive Due has spent a career proving that horror is where America tells the truth about itself. The American Book Award and NAACP Image Award-winning author of The Reformatory returned on September 22 with Mazywood, a 512-page literary horror novel from Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster — and it may be her most personal haunting yet.

Johnny, a filmmaker, brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, Mazelle Washington, a famous Black actress whose career ran from the 1920s through the 1940s. He expects a quiet retreat. Instead he uncovers the secret Mazelle nurtured from childhood, when a dark wish came true — and the monster it left lurking outside Mazywood, waiting for the family that has now walked into its hunting grounds. Told across three generations, with flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazelle’s story brushes against giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel.

Due knows this territory from the inside. She and her husband and collaborator, Steven Barnes, have pitched and worked in Hollywood for more than twenty years, writing an episode of Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone and work for Horror Noire, the landmark documentary on Black horror that Due executive produced for Shudder. In her letter to readers in the Mazywood book club kit, she describes falling in love with pioneers like Horne, Dorothy Dandridge and Hattie McDaniel — and what they endured. “What they experienced was a true horror story,” she writes, noting she “had a blast writing scenes with classic stars like Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable and Lena Horne — but the terror creeps in as she realizes what she is trading away for her fame.”

Due, who teaches Afrofuturism and Black horror at UCLA, is also the author of Ghost Summer and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, and co-wrote the civil rights memoir Freedom in the Family with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due. Mazywood is a creature story, a family saga and an act of recovery all at once — the rage Old Hollywood buried, dug up at last.

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