Product Description

From the author of Big Fish comes this haunting, tender story that weaves a tragic secret, a mysterious meeting with the Devil, and a family of charming circus freaks recounting the extraordinary adventures of their friend Henry Walker, the Negro Magician. 

In the middle of a dusty Southern town, in the middle of the twentieth century, magician Henry Walker entertains crowds at Jeremiah Musgrove’s Chinese Circus. Though not the world-famous illusionist he once was, Henry, with his dark skin and green eyes, is still something of a novelty to the patrons who pay a dime to see his show. Most of the patrons, anyway.

As the novel begins, one May night in 1954, Henry is confronted by three menacing white teens, and soon thereafter disappears. With his fate uncertain, his friends from the circus—Jenny the Ossified Girl, Rudy the Strong Man, and JJ the Barker—piece together what they know of Henry's mysterious and extraordinary life. The result is a spellbinding adventure that begins when ten-year-old Henry meets the devil, who gives him the art of magic and then steals the one thing that means the most to him. As Henry’s friends recount the remarkable adventures and incredible heartache that result from this childhood encounter, only one thing seems certain about Henry's life: nothing is as it appears.

Brimming with surprising twists and turns, and peopled with a literal circus of memorable characters, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician is Daniel Wallace at his finest. As in his beloved debut, Big Fish, Wallace once again conjures a wondrous tale with an emotional punch. This is a story of love and loss, identity and illusion, fate and choice; a story that will capture your heart and your imagination and not let go until the very last page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #664825 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-03
• Released on: 2007-07-03
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
An inept African-American illusionist is dogged by the deal he struck with the devil in Wallace's fourth novel, a circus picaresque that barnstorms its way through the 1950s American South. Henry Walker, once the "greatest magician in the world," has been reduced to a minstrel show–like novelty act in a traveling circus. Henry's story, told by a succession of narrators—including members of the circus and a private detective—begins during the Depression, when Henry's family fell on hard times. While down and out, Henry meets and apprentices with the devilish magician Mr. Sebastian. Henry learns the secrets of magic, but his ambition and ability are crimped when his beloved sister, Hannah, disappears. The truths of Henry's and Mr. Sebastian's identities and the fate of Hannah are gradually revealed, and what appears to be a Faustian tale of a pact with the devil turns out to be something more tragic. Wallace (Big Fish; The Watermelon King) skillfully unravels the tale, and though the conclusion is both startling and inevitable, and Henry is as beguiling and enigmatic a character as Wallace has created, the milieu of carnies, hucksters, tricksters and wanderers isn't as sharp as it could be. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Sheri Holman

The Devil in Daniel Wallace's engaging if sometimes elusive new novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician, frequents upscale summer resort hotels, lives in Muncie, Ind., knows a fair number of card tricks and is very, very white.

The Depression is raging when Henry Walker, the story's hero, first meets the Devil, a.k.a. Mr. Sebastian, in room 702 of the Fremont Hotel. Henry is 10 -- his mother is dead, his handyman father is a hapless alcoholic, and he has just lost his younger sister Hannah's affections to a stray dog named Joan Crawford. Dejected, he enters the room to find a man "sheet white, cloud white," moving a coin between his fingers and mysteriously disappearing and reappearing. Mr. Sebastian offers to teach Henry the secret of magic, beginning with sleights such as the Montana Hideaway and the Carpathian Struggle, but soon moving to real magic, unexplained, dangerous magic of the sort that requires the swearing of a blood oath: "I swear never to reveal the source of my magic or . . . perform any illusion to a nonmagician without first practicing the effect until the illusion is perfect; otherwise I will lose all that I have gained. I swear not only to practice illusion, but to live within it, to seem but not to be, for only in this way can we fully partake in the magical world."

Henry promises, and a few weeks later during an impromptu magic show again in Room 702, makes Hannah disappear. The problem is, despite all he tries, he can't get her to come back.

Hannah's disappearance and Henry's life-long search for her become the subject of a peripatetic narrative told by members of Jeremiah Mosgrove's Chinese Circus, where Henry Walker washes up in the 1950s. We learn that after Hannah's disappearance Henry took up with the Barnum-esque Tom Hailey, who convinced him to take melanin pills and sit in front of a light box to make himself appear black. After all, Hailey says, "There's a glut of Caucasian prestidigitation right now." Now known as Bakari (Swahili for One Who Will Succeed), Henry becomes a celebrity as a Negro magician until Hailey dies, the pills run out, and he is white again. After a fantastic stint in World War II in which Henry's magic is improbably credited with a crucial mission, and one extraordinary performance during which, appearing under his own name, he brings his dead assistant and lover back to life only to lose her again, he re-applies black face and goes out into the world performing as two men: one skilled and white, one bumbling and black. In this schizophrenic state, Henry tracks down and does battle with Mr. Sebastian, but can anyone really beat the Devil?

If it all seems dreamy and unbelievable, it's supposed to. Wallace's structure is its own parlor trick. Did Henry really make Hannah disappear? Was she abducted? Was she given up by her father, and is she now living a respectable life with Mr. Sebastian? The revolving narration makes each fragment of Henry's story true for the one who tells it, yet when truth itself remains a perpetual illusion, a book can teeter on the verge of sophistry. All becomes suggestion and misdirection, never allowing exploration of the larger themes of race and the evils of hypocritical respectability at which it hints. Instead of giving us so many characters freighted with mystery and seeming meaning, such as Jenny the Ossified Girl, Wallace might have let himself go deeper into the description that Jeremiah Mosgrove, the circus proprietor, gives of Henry as "an American of the highest order: a self-made freak."

The questions remain: Why are Negro magicians so rare? What is the cost of changing skins? Why does the Devil make pacts with the most mundane people? Without answers, we are left with a shadowy Henry whose personality and sense of purpose too easily vanish in a puff of smoke. But maybe that, too, is the point. Mr. Sebastian tells Henry that to make real magic "you have to find an audience who think they understand what's happening. . . . You will seek to present an effect so clever and skillful that the audience won't believe their eyes, and can't think of the explanation, but feel in their hearts there is one. But there won't be; even you won't be able to explain it. The sense of universal bafflement is part of the

entertainment." If Mr. Sebastian is to be believed, there is certainly magic here.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Daniel Wallace is best known for Big Fish, a clever tale about a son's search for the man behind his father. Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician uses some of the same fictional ruses but tackles the far more troublesome issues of race and hypocrisy. A few reviewers found fault with an extremely convoluted plot and some extremely unreliable narrators. But most praised Wallace's unique characters and unpredictable plot twists. "In the end," concludes the Portland Oregonian, "we learn that nothing is as it appears to be, which is what this fine novel is really all about."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

I love it.
Daniel Wallace works his magic again. "Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician" is sure to please fans of "Big Fish"--it's just as thrilling, poignant, bighearted, and vividly visual. But it's also an extended and multilayered portrait of a fascinating group of people--circus freaks and ordinary folk struggling through the Depression and their own complex lives--and their voices are pitch-perfect. This novel is highly, wickedly entertaining, mysterious, suspenseful, and, finally, heartbreaking--but it's the kind of heartbreak that leaves you smiling through your tears. Run out and buy it, and write a letter to your favorite Hollywood director demanding the film. Work like this deserves your support.

An impressive Follow Up to Big Fish
It seemed impossible to top Big FIsh, but Daniel Wallace did it with Mr. Sebastian. It's a rich and emotional mystery full of amazing magic, epic love, undying friendship, and heartbreaking tragedy. The story unfolds beautifully, and keeps you guessing right up to the end. It's almost impossible to get into the plot without giving things away so I won't.
I don't want to overhype the book, but it's REALLY good. I can't wait for the movie. Hopefully Tim Burton will do this one too. It seems right up his alley for sure.

An Epic Tale of High Adventure
Mr. Wallace takes us on a fantastic voyage through an incredibly colorful world filled with complex and fascinating characters. A poignant, thoughtful and thoroughly involving story that left me questioning my own memories as much as those of Mr. Sebastian. I've been a big fan of the author's work for years and have read all his previous books but this is by far his best. In short, a work of art.