Step Right Up Step Right Up. Inside you will see legends, monsters and Amazement's only your human eye can see, and Your Human Mind can not believe.
Some men become legends. Others are erased from history. Artemis Smithers somehow became both.
London, 1851.
Twelve-year-old Artemis Smithers is starving, homeless, and running from a violent home when he collapses outside Oscar Harrington's Grand Traveling Sideshow. He awakens among the very people polite society pays to stare at: Tessie, the celebrated bearded woman; Madame Zedanya, the mysterious fortune teller; strongmen, fire eaters, human curiosities, and performers who become the first real family Artemis has ever known.
Under the canvas, the frightened boy discovers something extraordinary.
He was born to be a showman.
More than a century later, historian and writer Serenity Scott begins investigating the nearly forgotten Harrington & Smithers sideshow. Oscar Harrington appears throughout the historical record.
Artemis Smithers does not.
There are photographs that should not exist. Newspaper stories that contradict private journals. Names scratched from ledgers. Faces deliberately removed from photographs. And wherever Serenity searches, she finds the same unanswered question:
What happened to Artemis Smithers?
Her investigation eventually leads her to an old house near Gibsonton,Fl, and to a guarded man known simply as Art, who knows far more about the vanished showman than any living person possibly should.
As Serenity follows Artemis across nearly two centuries of love, violence, spectacle, betrayal, and loss, she discovers that history did not merely forget the people behind the sideshow banners.
Someone has been making certain they are remembered.
And some promises last far longer than a lifetime.
Step beneath the canvas.
Believe only half of what you see.
Question everything you hear.
Most importantly... remember every name.
The Enigmatic Mr. Smithers is a sweeping Gothic mystery about found family, immortality, misunderstood monsters, the forgotten history of the sideshow, and the terrible price of refusing to let go.
