Every bargain in this novel has terms buried in it. In 1926 a seven-year-old in the Florida woods throws a penny into a pool and asks for a best friend who will love her better than anyone and do an act with her, and she gets precisely that, and the wording turns out to be the problem. Fifteen years later a producer slides a contract across a desk with a magnificent script resting on top of it, and the script is the bait. Mazywood by Tananarive Due is a novel about fine print, and about a Black woman who keeps signing because the alternative is hunger.
The Wish Tananarive Due Builds the Book On
The girl is Mazelle Washington, youngest child of a retired vaudeville family in Gracetown, the haunted Florida town readers of Due’s earlier work will recognise. The older children at school say the Wishing Pool is a lie. They also say that wishes try to trick you, so you have to name everything you want, down to the smallest detail. Mazelle forgets to specify that her best friend should be human.
What she gets is Scout: a filthy white dog on the road home who bows like a knight, dances on two legs, obeys commands she has not spoken out loud, never sleeps, and smells of swamp. He also makes her famous. Within two years she is Little Mazy, the highest-paid Black child in Hollywood, headlining a knock-off of Our Gang for a producer named Jerry Lorenzo.
Mazywood by Tananarive Due is built as a braid. One strand follows Mazelle from 1926 to her deathbed in 1980. The other is a single December weekend in the present, when her grandson brings his wife and daughters to the mountain resort she built, a place he has spent fifty years refusing to visit.
What the Contract Cost
The Hollywood strand is the engine, and it is merciless in the specific way only well-researched fiction can be. Mazelle is nine when talkies arrive and a dialect coach is hired to teach her how the character should sound, demonstrating it for her in a voice one step from blackface. Her mother braids her hair into deliberate untidiness because the studio requires it. She is given sack dresses with holes cut for the arms while the white six-year-old beside her gets ribbons and makeup.
She is also the family’s only income, and she knows it before anyone tells her. That is the trap the book keeps returning to. Every humiliation is attached to a cheque that keeps her father in medicine and the house out of foreclosure, and Mazywood by Tananarive Due never lets the reader pretend the choice was free.
Later comes the worst deal of her life: a producer dangles a genuinely great script, a Harlem Renaissance drama with a lead role written for a young Black woman, in order to get a signature on a four-year contract. What he actually intends to make is a franchise about a lazy maid. It earns her a fortune and ends her.
The 1939 Chapters Are the Best Thing Here
Aged eighteen, Mazelle takes extra work on Gone with the Wind playing a freed slave for five dollars a day, and the novel briefly becomes something close to great. She is taken in by Hattie McDaniel, who explains the economics without a shred of self-pity: she would rather not play maids, and the alternative is being one.
Due writes these women as strategists rather than victims. McDaniel’s professionalism is a deliberate weapon, first on set and word-perfect on the first take, because respect once lost is not recoverable. There is a card room the Black cast keeps secret in a supply closet, with rules against noise and liquor, existing purely so that a handful of people can stop performing for an hour. There is a scene in a locked bathroom at a segregated hotel where a famous young star tells Mazelle plainly that there is no leading role waiting for either of them, because the industry will not permit a Black leading man to stand beside her.
These chapters carry the moral weight of Mazywood by Tananarive Due. The horror is almost incidental to them, which is a strange thing to say about a novel with a monster in it.
Where Tananarive Due Loses the Thread
- It is too long. Roughly a hundred pages too long, nearly all of them in the present-day middle. The family circles the same snowfield, the same hollow tree, the same fading tracks, and the tension thins with each loop.
- The helpful ghost is a crutch. Whenever the grandson is stuck, his dead uncle materialises to tell him to use the snowshoes, brace his foot, dig at an angle, climb further left. Moving the first time, a machine by the fourth.
- The modern family is thinner than Mazelle. The wife’s carefully built ambivalence about a late pregnancy, and her academic career riding on an unwritten book, both get set up in the first act and then quietly abandoned once the snow starts.
- One sympathetic stranger exists to die. A dying podcaster gets a full chapter of interior life, cancer and grief and a failed marriage, and serves as the opening kill.
- The hinge is a coincidence. The present-day half of Mazywood by Tananarive Due turns on a woman happening to resemble her husband’s grandmother and happening to put on her robe and perfume on the one weekend they visit.
- Two speeches over-explain the theme. Late on, characters say out loud what the previous four hundred pages have already demonstrated about legacy.
What Tananarive Due Gets Right
The thirteen-year-old in the present day, Imani, is the best-written child in a horror novel I have read this year. She is autistic and has ADHD, she has taught herself fire-lighting and shelter-building from survival television, and both facts are load-bearing rather than decorative. The same wiring that makes her leave two fuel cans behind at a petrol station is the wiring that makes her the only person in the family who has packed for a catastrophe, and the only one who keeps believing something everyone else has written off.
The creature is a real invention too. It does not walk so much as float, it swims beneath snow, it camouflages itself as a drift, and it keeps its dead owner’s press clippings in a nest. The best pages of Mazywood by Tananarive Due make it frightening and pitiable in the same breath, which is much harder to pull off than either one alone.
Content Notes
Mazywood by Tananarive Due earns a long list. Graphic animal and human death, including dismemberment, severed body parts and a room of stacked human and animal bones. A child beaten with a hairbrush and a metal spoon. Domestic violence. A sexual assault by an employer, described from the victim’s dissociated point of view, plus coercion and the exploitation of young actresses. Racial slurs and sustained racist humiliation, including a detailed account of minstrel performance. A parent burning a child with a heated comb. Terminal illness, bedsores and a discussion of euthanising a dying relative. Serious injury with exposed bone. Pregnancy peril. Compulsory hospital-free isolation, and a great deal of snow.
Read These Next
Mazywood by Tananarive Due shares its Florida setting with her best-known novel, so start there:
- The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. Same town, same century, and the one to pair this with.
- This Cursed House by Del Sandeen. Black gothic horror built on a family that keeps its bargains hidden.
- Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray. For the historical strand rather than the monster.
- Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. Another novel about the price of respectable success.
Readers arriving at the genre from outside it should begin with our guide to horror books for people who have never read horror.
The Verdict
Trim the present-day middle and this would be one of the year’s best horror novels. Even bloated, the central idea holds: the wish and the studio contract are the same instrument, and both of them grant exactly what was asked for and nothing that was assumed.
What stays with me from Mazywood by Tananarive Due is the last page, which I will not describe beyond this. The novel spends six hundred pages demonstrating that nobody in this family learned anything from what the first wish cost, and then hands the whole apparatus, cheerfully, to a child.
