By Terri Schlichenmeyer

The brochure made it look so relaxing.

Roomy accommodations, gourmet meals, personalized service, ample staff, and your every wish fulfilled. Who wouldn’t want a vacation at a place like that? It almost sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? In the new novel, “Mazywood” by Tananarive Due, it is.

Johnny Washington needed a vacation.

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 – Sharise would leave for college soon – but Johnny’s wife, Tasha, just learned that she was pregnant again.

Was that welcome news? They weren’t quite sure yet. Then Tasha suggested a weekend getaway at Big Bear, to the lodge he’d inherited from his grandmother, Mazelle, putting Johnny even more on-edge.

The daughter of vaudeville entertainers, Mazelle Washington had big dreams. One of them came true after she wished for a “best friend forever,” 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.

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 “Lazy Mazy.”

When Mazelle learned that she’d been tricked, she angrily fled, purchasing a compound in the mountains, creating a retreat where Black entertainers were welcome.

But Johnny was never welcome there. As a child, Mazelle had terrified and abused him, and he couldn’t forget. Nor could he forget seeing things scurrying beneath the snow outside his grandmother’s cabin…

If you’re looking for a good screamy novel for your fall enjoyment, you really can’t expect it from “Mazywood.” This isn’t a slasher kind of story, and there is no maniac to blame. Nothing will jump out at you here, and there’s 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, an unknown entity that could be lurking silently behind you right now, waiting for you to let down your guard. Then, keeping you wrapped in that tale, Due makes you understand that those cautions won’t help, that monsters know no boundaries. That makes readers squirm with a deliciously foreboding sense, starting at page one.

Oh, and there’s authenticity and history inside this novel, like icing on the cake.

Kick off your front-of-the-fireplace, dark-of-night reading season with this nice, hefty book. Take “Mazywood,” lock the doors, head to your easy chair, and never mind about relaxing.