Humboldt Cut: A Redwood Gothic

Summary

Deep within the massive redwood forests of northern California, a Black woman encounters supernatural forces while confronting disturbing truths about her family legacy in this darkly humorous novel of ecohorror.

Jasmine Bay is a nurse for an Oakland mental health facility, battling her own demons, 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 isolation to protect herself—even if it means denying herself a hopeful future with co-worker and potential love interest Henry.

When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redcedar for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather William Whipple made a living deforesting the countryside, raping and 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 more dark secrets perpetrated by Jas’s family. Unnatural acts giving birth to entities made of human flesh and petrified bark, seeking to avenge the devastation that ravaged their land. It is an inheritance that threatens to consume the remnants of Jas’s family, and her very sanity …

Celebrated comedy writer Allison Mick’s Humboldt Cut exposes the traumatic costs of environmental destruction in this energetic horror adventure that combines the botanical terrors of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the psychological horror of The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones with a dash of Jordan Peele.

“This isn’t just a debut—it’s a revelation. A sensory experience that will make you forget where you are, Humboldt Cut gets under the skin and stays there.”—Neena Viel, author of Listen to Your Sister