“While Hand paces her mystery with classic precision, the real reward of Curious Toys lies in its richly textured panorama of Chicago during a crucial period of change, and in its vivid characters. Riverview, of course, is legendary among older Chicagoans, and Hand presents it not as a generic carnival-murder setting, but as a kind of distorting mirror of cultural anxieties, many of which are still with us today…As for Darger, Hand maintains a sensitive balance between what little we know of him and what she needs to invent for her novel…How Darger finally affects Pin, and how she affects him, leads to a moving and thought-provoking conclusion.”

—Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune

“Compelling for its smart, streetwise, complicated protagonist, teenage Pin—and for the careful and vivid evocation of Pin’s Chicago circa 1915, with all of its sordid glories.”

—Arkady Martine, National Public Radio

“Hand beautifully captures the era in this historical novel alongside the landscape of Chicago and its neighborhoods and slums…The world Hand creates is more than just a backdrop for a crime. The locations act as a character. When Pin discovers the body of a young girl killed inside a boat ride—aptly named the Hell Gate—the carnival architecture functions like a participant in the violence…One of Hand’s remarkable abilities is the deftness with which she creates dynamic and unique voices for each point-of-view character, helping the reader track multiple storylines throughout a complex tale. Equally important, in the midst of it all, Hand fashions a darn good mystery.”

—Elena Hartwell, New York Journal of Books

“While its plot involves a serial killer in the Chicago summer of 1915, the latest novel from genre-crossing master storyteller Elizabeth Hand journeys from thriller territory straight into the heart of horror. One crucial early sequence finds the child protagonist Pin—a young woman passing as a boy—searching for a missing girl in the brackish water of an amusement park’s pitch-black ‘Hell Gate’ boat ride. Complete with pop-up undead, a costumed devil, the screams of the damned, and passengers trying to squeeze in some quickie sex, Hand’s old-timey tunnel of love proves a richly layered study of horror and sin and fantasy and reality, all in a peculiarly American vein. And it’s scary as hell.”

—Amy Brady, Chicago Review of Books

“Curious Toys is wonderful! I stayed up late two nights in a row, transported. It will be catnip for readers who love Chicago, circuses, cross-dressers, and early cinema.”

—Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife