Step right up · A darkly whimsical adventure by Joshua Shackles
Old Joplin is coming back.
The trouble is getting everyone home.
Joplin has placed its entire annual event grant behind one enormous Halloween night, and Tess Mercer intends to make its centerpiece impossible to forget: a lantern-shaped float with the skyline of old Joplin blazing through its walls.
Then Vesper’s Grand Traveling Jubilee arrives with striped tents, impossible performers, and a backstage lamp that seems older than the show itself.
When Tess lights the lantern, the past does more than appear. The Connor Hotel opens its doors. A streetcar rolls down streets with no rails. Skeleton musicians join the band. Beyond the final booth, the festival keeps unfolding into a city that is bigger on the inside, all part of a night that has no intention of ending.
At first, it feels like every impossible thing Tess hoped to make real. Then visitors begin disappearing into rooms that rearrange themselves, and Owen is offered a place in the show by the first adult who seems to truly understand him.
To bring her brother and the festivalgoers home, Tess must do the one thing she finds hardest: stop taking over, listen to the people around her, and trust that no rescue belongs to one person.
Tess, Owen, Imani, and Benji know what a show is really made of: paint, props, maps, paperwork, arguments, repairs, and people whose work is easy to miss. Those same skills may be their only way home.
A gifted designer who can repair a torn costume, redraw a bad hinge, and take charge of an entire workshop. Listening, especially to Owen, is harder. With her family preparing to leave Joplin, the festival feels like her last chance to get something exactly right.
Tess’s precise, imaginative younger brother. He draws monsters with useful wings, notices the openings adults miss, and asks questions nobody else thinks to ask. When Vesper takes his ideas seriously, the invitation is difficult to resist.
Fast with a joke and steady when the plan falls apart. She notices the workers, paperwork, and overlooked people who keep a spectacle running. She refuses to treat anyone as expendable.
A careful historian who trusts photographs, floor plans, and records to reveal what the eye can miss. Then old Joplin begins changing faster than he can document it, and every map leads somewhere it should not.
The novel’s magic grows from real Joplin landmarks, vanished buildings, and the people who built, maintained, and remembered them. Patrick Murphy asks what year it is. Mina Schifferdecker appears on a staircase. History does not sit safely behind a display rope; it steps into the festival.
Explore the Haunted Joplin guidePeace Church CemeteryWhere a weathered name asks the first question of the story: what happens when nobody remembers?
02Murphysburg & the Schifferdecker HouseHistoric homes, borrowed cardigans, impossible visitors, and the neighborhood at the center of Joplin’s Halloween gamble.
03The Connor HotelA vanished landmark restored in warm light, with attentive staff, tempting invitations, and doors that refuse to stay where they belong.
04Midway ParkLost attractions and glass gardens return among the trees, lit by lanterns nobody placed there.
05Crystal CaveA familiar Joplin name above a staircase that descends much farther than it should.
06Union DepotWhere the language of arrivals and departures becomes more than history, and the last train matters again.
“The dead woman’s name was either Ellen or Helen, and Owen refused to leave until somebody decided which.”
Tess stood behind him with a bag of leaves dragging against her knee. Across Peace Church Cemetery, volunteers worked between the stones in the bright, slanting light. Somebody’s rake caught in a root. Somebody else had brought an enormous box of doughnuts and left it open to the attention of three yellow jackets.
“Take a picture,” Tess said.
“I did. It looks like Ellen in the picture.”
“Then put Ellen.”
Quick answers for readers, parents, teachers, librarians, and anyone deciding whether to step through the first door.
