Halloween on Spring Street

This description is 1,956 characters with spaces. It doesn’t give away who survives or what happens to Opal.Don’t you lay your head down in this town.Every Halloween in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the old folks say the same thing. Seventeen-year-old Jolene Dowd has always thought it was just one of the stories the town tells tourists. Then her grandmother sits her down at the kitchen table and tells her the rest of it.In 1883 the men of Eureka Springs dragged Zilpha Dowd, a water witch who had grown rich finding the healing springs, down the hill by her hair and drowned her in Basin Spring. Since then, in certain years, teenagers in town go to sleep on Halloween night and never wake up. It happened in 1938, in 1957, in 1983 and in 2002, and it comes when a Dowd girl turns seventeen.Jo turned seventeen in June.She promises Mamaw Opal she’ll stay awake at her friend Tater’s haunted-barn party out past Lake Leatherwood. She doesn’t. At midnight Jo and five friends wake up barefoot on a white gravel road in the fog, looking up a hill at a Victorian house with every window lit. A kind-faced old woman meets them at the door and calls herself Aunt Zilpha. She has a game for them: find a key in every room and bring them all to her kitchen before the clock’s single hand reaches sunrise, or stay in her house forever.The rooms are the ones Tater built for his haunt: a mad scientist’s lab, a library, a séance parlor, a nursery, a butcher shop. But Zilpha has furnished them with everything the six of them fear. And this is the night the clocks fall back, so the longest night of the year just got an hour longer.While Jo and her friends fight their way through the house, their sleeping bodies lie in a hayloft, and Opal Dowd sits among them with jugs of spring water and a prayer with no Jesus in it. Up at the Thistledown, Granny Hazel’s circle of women is getting ready too.Hallows Sleep is a folk horror novel set in the Arkansas Ozarks. It draws on real history, old mountain magic and the springs under the town that still remember.