Humboldt Cut
by Allison Mick

Jordan Peele and Jeff VanderMeer meet The Overstory in comedy writer Allison Mick’s darkly humorous debut 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 at an Oakland mental-health facility, battling her own demons and caught in a spiral of suicidal despair. Estranged from her brother James and his wife Tilly—once her best friend—Jas has chosen self-isolation to protect herself, even if it means denying a hopeful future with co-worker and potential love interest Henry Lewis.

When her godmother dies, Jas returns to Redceder for the funeral, a logging town where her grandfather William Whipple made a living deforesting the countryside—ripping apart nature’s very foundations for corporate profit. As trees fell to axes and chainsaws, so did dozens of lumberjacks, victims not only of workplace hazards but also of the ecoterrorism of Jas’s grandfather, who was lynched for his crimes.

Buried in the haunted woods are even darker secrets perpetrated by Jas’s family. Unnatural acts have given birth to entities 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 an energetic, darkly humorous horror adventure that combines the botanical terrors of VanderMeer’s Annihilation and the psychological horror of Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians with a dash of Jordan Peele.