Résumé: It was the morning of Paisley Curtin's sixteenth birthday when she realized her town was doomed. Just one week before, a traveling carnival had rolled into the quiet hillside community of Obidiah's Glenn and right away things began to get weird. The carnival itself was strange enough, with its seedy sideshows and sinister exhibitions, its Room of False Mirrors, its dangerous Gallows Hand game and the monstrous caged creature called the Tom-Geek.
Then parents in the town began to get sick, followed by the teachers, doctors and the sheriff's department. The children of Obidiah's Glenn become suddenly wild, roaming about at night with crazed looks in their eyes. Paisley realizes she had to do something to stop what she saw happening--but there wasn't anyone left in town who seemed to be able to help. So she sends a letter to someone she hoped might listen, someone who would know what to do--a friend of her late sister's from college, a self-styled "girl detective" with a questionable reputation named Judy Drood.
Her only hope is that Judy will arrive in time to save her town--and to prevent her from ending up as yet another exhibit in the dark carnival's Hall of Embalmed Abominations!