Humboldt Cut: A Redwood Gothic

Jordan Peele and Chuck Tingle meet The Overstory in comedy writer Allison Mick’s darkly humorous eco-horror novel, as a Black woman returns home to the redwood forests of northern California, only to unearth the monsters that lurk among the trees…

Jasmine Bay is a nurse for an Oakland mental health facility, caught in a spiral of suicidal despair. Estranged from her brother James and his wife Tilly, who was once her best friend, Jas has chosen emotional isolation—even if it means denying herself romance with her co-worker Henry.

When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redcedar for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather  made a living deforesting the countryside, ripping apart nature’s very foundations for corporate profits. As trees fell to axes and chainsaws, so did dozens of lumberjacks, falling prey to the dangers of their job—and to the ecoterrorism of Jas’s grandfather who was lynched for his crimes.

And buried in the haunted woods are even darker secrets. Creatures made of human flesh and petrified bark seek to avenge the devastation that ravaged their land—an inheritance that threatens to consume the remnants of Jas’s family. . .