c.2026, Saga Press
\n$32.00
\n512 pages<\/p>\n
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
\nThe Truth Contributor<\/p>\n
The brochure made it look so relaxing.<\/p>\n
Roomy accommodations, gourmet meals, personalized service, ample staff, and your every wish fulfilled. Who wouldn\u2019t want a vacation at a place like that? It almost sounds too good to be true, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 In the new novel, Mazywood <\/em>by Tananarive Due<\/strong>, it is.<\/p>\n Johnny Washington needed a vacation.<\/p>\n As a Hollywood screenwriter, his life was one long string of stresses and the latest problem was the last straw. His daughters, Sharise and Imani, were teenagers now \u2013 Sharise would leave for college soon – but Johnny\u2019s wife, Tasha, just learned that she was pregnant again.<\/p>\n Was that welcome news? They weren\u2019t quite sure yet. Then Tasha suggested a weekend getaway at Big Bear, to the lodge he\u2019d inherited from his grandmother, Mazelle, putting Johnny even more on-edge.<\/p>\n The daughter of vaudeville entertainers, Mazelle Washington had big dreams. One of them came true after she wished for a \u201cbest friend forever,\u201d and she found a dirty stray dog on her way home, a dog that turned out to have a strange mental connection with her. Scout would do anything Mazelle wanted. Anything at all.<\/p>\n A trained dog and a cute kid were Hollywood catnip and Mazelle and Scout became famous movie stars in racist roles that embarrassed Mazelle, but her contract kept the family afloat. Later, after being phased out of kiddie movies because of puberty, she took a brief hiatus before returning to Hollywood where, encouraged by the likes of Hattie McDaniel and Clark Gable, she hoped to revive her career. Instead, she was contracted for a movie series in which she played a shiftless Jim-Crow-era maid the producer called \u201cLazy Mazy.\u201d<\/p>\n When Mazelle learned that she\u2019d been tricked, she angrily fled, purchasing a compound in the mountains, creating a retreat where Black entertainers were welcome.<\/p>\n But Johnny was never welcome there. As a child, Mazelle had terrified and abused him, and he couldn\u2019t forget. Nor could he forget seeing things scurrying beneath the snow outside his grandmother\u2019s cabin\u2026<\/p>\n If you\u2019re looking for a good screamy novel for your fall enjoyment, you really can\u2019t expect it from Mazywood<\/em>. This isn\u2019t a slasher kind of story, and there is no maniac to blame. Nothing will jump out at you here, and there\u2019s minimal blood. Instead, author Tananarive Due tells a good story while also making readers want to turn on all the lights and double-check the locks against an evil hides in a slyly-implied, barely-specified something,<\/em> an unknown entity that could be lurking silently behind you right now,<\/em> waiting for you to let down your guard. Then, keeping you wrapped in that tale, Due makes you understand that those cautions won\u2019t help, that monsters know no boundaries. That makes readers squirm with a deliciously foreboding sense, starting at page one.<\/p>\n Oh, and there\u2019s authenticity and history inside this novel, like icing on the cake.<\/p>\n Kick off your front-of-the-fireplace, dark-of-night reading season with this nice, hefty book. Take Mazywood,<\/em> lock the doors, head to your easy chair, and never mind about relaxing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" c.2026, Saga Press $32.00 512 pages By Terri Schlichenmeyer The Truth Contributor The brochure made it look so relaxing. Roomy accommodations, gourmet meals, personalized service, ample staff, and your every wish fulfilled. Who wouldn\u2019t want a vacation at a place like that? It almost sounds too good to be true, doesn\u2019t it?\u00a0 In the new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[20],"class_list":["post-20855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book_review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20857,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20855\/revisions\/20857"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20855"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=20855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}