Mazywood

1926, GRACETOWN, FLORIDA.

A young Mazelle sets out from her Florida home to find the Wishing Pool, and make her wish for a better life. A best friend forever, who will love her better than anyone else.

It seems her wish has come true, and she is suddenly a star of the silver screen, her entire family lifted from poverty. Johnny Washington, Mazelle’s grandson, late in his screenwriting career, needs a break after a major project falls through. So he takes his wife and daughters out to Mazywood, the remote retreat he inherited from his grandmother.

But wishes are tricky things, and fame isn’t always fortune. Hidden in the forest around Mazywood is a legacy of pain and sorrow, of a family turned against itself by legacies of racism.

As they uncover Mazelle’s lost legacy, a terrifying creature stalks the woods, and Johnny and his family are thrust into a desperate fight for survival in the icy wilderness around Mazywood.

About the Author

Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions.

Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). Learn more at TananariveDue.com.